I Used to Live Here Once enables one of our most excitingly intuitive biographers to uncover the hidden truth about a fascinatingly elusive woman. Luminous and penetrating, Seymour’s biography reveals a proud and fiercely independent artist, one who experienced tragedy and extreme poverty, alcohol and drug dependency, romantic and sexual turmoil-and yet was never a victim. But it’s a shock to discover that no biographer-until now-has researched the crucial 17 years that Rhys spent living on the remote Caribbean island of Dominica, the island that haunted Rhys’ mind and her work for the rest of her life. Many details of Rhys’ life emerge from her memoir, Smile Please and the stories she wrote throughout her long and challenging career. Rhys’ experiences of heartbreak, poverty, notoriety, breakdowns and even imprisonment all became grist for her writing, forming an iconic ‘Rhys woman’ whose personality-vulnerable, witty, watchful and angry-was often mistaken, and still is, for a self-portrait.
Memories of a conflicted Caribbean childhood haunt the four fictions that Rhys wrote during her extraordinary years as an exile in 1920s Paris and later in England. Īn obsessive and troubled genius, Jean Rhys is one of the most compelling and unnerving writers of the 20th century. A Times Literary Non-Fiction Book of the Year 2022Īn intimate, revealing and profoundly moving biography of Jean Rhys, acclaimed author of Wide Sargasso Sea.
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