The Blue Hour: A Life of Jean Rhys
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4.0 • 1 Rating
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- $17.99
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- $17.99
Publisher Description
A groundbreaking biography of a psychologically traumatized novelist who forever changed the way we look at women in fiction.
Jean Rhys (1890–1979) is best known for her 1966 novel Wide Sargasso Sea. A prequel to Jane Eyre, Rhys’s revolutionary work reimagined the story of Bertha Rochester—the misunderstood “madwoman in the attic” who was driven to insanity by cruelties beyond her control. The Blue Hour performs a similar exhumation of Rhys’s life, which was haunted by demons from within and without. Its examination of Rhys’s pain and loss charts her desperate journey from the jungles of Dominica to a British boarding school, and then into an adult life scarred by three failed marriages, the deaths of her two children, and her long battle with alcoholism.A mesmerizing evocation of a fragile and brilliant mind, The Blue Hour explores the crucial element that ultimately spared Rhys from the fate of her most famous protagonist: a genius that rescued her, again and again, from the abyss.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The genius of novelist Jean Rhys (1890 1979) is painfully depicted in this compelling short biography, exploring what it was like to live such a tortured life. Rhys was overlooked for decades until Wide Sargasso Sea, her postmodern shift of emphasis on Jane Eyre, became an instant sensation in 1966. Three times married to ne'er-do-wells and enduring an unhappy dollop of motherhood, Rhys was better known as the lover of Ford Maddox Ford. According to British author Pizzichini (Dead Man's Wages), both Ford's "predatory paternalism" and his novelist's flattery attracted and repelled her, as did the criminal element of society. Pizzichini searches Rhys's background for clues to her self-destructive judgments. Born in Dominica as Ella Gwendolen Rees Williams, she was later a free-spirited young outsider in starchy, empirical England and elsewhere in Europe. Stuck with men who couldn't make ends meet, Rhys had a brief career in prostitution and also worked as a chorus girl. Evocative and empathetic, Pizzichini still offers no fully satisfactory explanation for the explosiveness of Rhys's interior life: "She found life difficult because she found it hard to be herself." 20 photos.
