The Jean Rhys re-discovery story is legendary. In 1949, an appeal published in The New Statesman for information about the author of the interwar novels Quartet, After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie, Voyage in the Dark, and Good Morning, Midnight—presumed dead because nothing had been heard of her for many years—was answered by the author herself: not dead at all but buried alive by penury and alcoholism. Not dead and, as it happened, in the midst of writing the post-colonial masterpiece Wide Sargasso Sea, which would bring her much late-life acclaim. Up until the happy ending, it could be a story out of one of Rhys’s own novels.
In her new biography of the British novelist, I Used to Live Here Once, Miranda Seymour makes her first point about her subject by using the many identities behind which she concealed herself as section headings. Before she settled on Jean, Rhys was born Gwen Williams and then became Ella—sensitive child and then waif-like chorus girl, left brokenhearted in London at 21 when her wealthy lover turned out to have no intention of marrying her.
