Curated by Hilton Als, this exhibition casts a wide net for the author’s Creole world
Ella Gwendoline Rees Williams, born in Dominica in 1890, only became Jean Rhys during the 1920s, under the influence of her sometime lover and literary Svengali, Ford Madox Ford. She had already, by then, lived a busy life: rebelling against her mother; being packed off to England; becoming a chorus girl; marrying the first of her three husbands; giving birth twice, once to a short-lived son, the second time to a daughter who survived her. She also started to write fiction. It would be four decades until she published her most successful book, Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), a prequel to Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre set in Jamaica, telling the story of Mr Rochester’s first wife. Wide Sargasso Sea brought Rhys fame at last, and is now regularly cited as one of the best novels of the twentieth century.
