Introduction

Abstract

Had Jean Rhys’s fiction been merely autobiographical, as so many critics have claimed, her plots would have strained the reader’s credulity. Her life was indeed quite out of the ordinary. Jean Rhys was born Ella Gwendoline Rees Williams on 24 August 1890 in Roseau, Dominica, to a Creole mother and a Welsh doctor. She spent her childhood there and left when she was seventeen to attend the Perse School in Cambridge. After a few terms, she decided that she wanted to be an actress and went to the Academy of Dramatic Art in 1909. When her father died suddenly, her family could no longer support her and Jean Rhys found a job in the chorus of a touring company. This is how, as Elgin W. Mellown puts it, ‘a young girl from a respectable colonial family […] lived a life that brought her into the demimondaine society of pre-War England’.¹