Notes
An obsessive and troubled genius, Jean Rhys is one of the most compelling and unnerving writers of the 20th century. 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. Rhys's 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.
