As a new exhibition of art responding to the work of Jean Rhys opens, Esther Freud examines the writer’s enduring legacy
I was in my mid-twenties, working as an actress, attempting, sporadically, to write, when I came across a copy of Voyage in the Dark lying face up on a market stall. I'd never heard of Jean Rhys. or the novel she's most famous for - Wide Sargasso Sea - but this slim paperback, with a sad, dark-eyed girl on its cover. was calling out to me as no book had before. 'Frank, economical and exact' was how it was described on the jacket, ' ... with a funny-sad poetry all its own'. For one pound, it was mine.
