Who was Jean Rhys?
Jean Rhys was a 20th century novelist who is best known for her novel Wide Sargasso Sea, which is a postcolonial and feminist response to Charlotte Bronte’s novel Jane Eyre, a Victorian classic. Jean Rhys was born on 24 August 1890 as Ella Gwendolen Rees Williams. She was born in Dominica, a West Indian Island which was once a British Colony. Her mother was a Scottish Creole, and her father was a Welsh man. Rhys lived in Dominica until her sixteenth year, when her family relocated to England. In her twenties and thirties, the author traveled throughout Europe, living an artistic Bohemian lifestyle. Rhys’s first four novels were published during the second and third decades of the twentieth century. Her work was promoted by other, more well-known authors such as Ford Maddox Ford. It was not until 1966, however, when Wide Sargasso Sea was published, that Rhys became regarded as an important literary figure. In the interim, she withdrew from the public sphere. In 1967, the year following
