The Blue Hour: A Life of Jean Rhys

by Lilian Pizzichini

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780393079395
Publisher:	Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	02/07/2011
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	336
File size:	898 KB

About the Author

British biographer Lilian Pizzichini has worked for the Literary Review and the Times Literary Supplement.

Editorial Reviews

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. (Apr. 29)

Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Publishers Weekly

In this biography of author Jean Rhys (best known for her 1966 novel, Wide Sargasso Sea), Pizzichini (Dead Men's Wages) seeks to present the facts of Rhys's life so that the reader can understand what it was like. Pizzichini crafts a fascinating psychological study as she vividly illustrates Rhys's desperation and fragility, portraying how she sought to write out her experiences-including extreme poverty, a husband in prison, mental instability, alcoholism, and the deaths of her two children-in her novels. The reader might question Pizzichini's dependency on Rhys's fiction to explain her life, but Pizzichini makes a case that Rhys wrote her life in her many novels and that the fictional cannot be separated from the actual. Pizzichini sees a justifiably angry woman, and her approach to Rhys's work is influenced by her sympathy. Read in conjunction with Carole Angier's well-documented and detailed Jean Rhys: Life and Work, this is an excellent addition to the studies of one of the 20th century's important modernist authors. Recommended for academic libraries. (Index and photos not seen.) [See Prepub Alert, LJ12/08.]
—Susan L. Peters

Library Journal

Atmospheric but sloppily written, skimpily researched biography of the British novelist whose depressed, dependent heroines echoed her own neurasthenia. Born Ella Gwendolen Rees Williams in the West Indian colony of Dominica, Jean Rhys (1890-1979) apparently sustained lifelong damage from her mother's indifference and the terrifying tales of zombies and werewolves related by a nursemaid. She rarely had close female friends after moving to England in 1907, and felt hardly any better about the men who both supported and demeaned her once she quit an uncertain career as a chorus girl and began years of passively living on the chancy largesse of her lovers and three husbands (two shady operators and one failed literary agent). She began chronicling blank, bleak existences like hers in fiction in the mid-'20s, when novelist Ford Madox Ford published her in the Transatlantic Review under the name Jean Rhys. (He also entangled her in a menage a trois.) "She writes about long periods of nothingness with an insight born of bitter experience," writes British literary journalist Pizzichini (Dead Men's Wages, 2002). "Textual elisions punctuate her words, reflecting her blankness." The biography has a similarly flat affect, noting with no moral judgments Rhys's heavy drinking, fits of rage and seemingly total inability to take care of herself. The productive decade that produced Quartet, After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie and two other novels, equally notable for their stark prose and sordid subject matter, ended in 1939. Rhys would not publish another book until 1966, when Wide Sargasso Sea brought her late-life fame with a fictional reimagining of the mad wife from Jane Eyre. Aiming to write about hersubject "on her own terms," Pizzichini essentially relies on Rhys' autobiographical novels and Carole Angier's more thorough Jean Rhys (1990) for factual details, concentrating on limning her precarious emotional states with cringe-inducing empathy. Pizzichini's indulgent wallowing in her subject's excesses leaves the impression that Rhys was little more than the crazy drunk people often took her for.

Kirkus Reviews