Volume 38, Number 16 · October 10, 1991
Down & Out in Paris & London
By Al Alvarez
Jean Rhys: Life and Work
by Carole Angier
Little, Brown, 762 pp., $35.00
Jean Rhys was seventy-six years old before she had a literary success. Her first five books—a collection of short stories and four novels, published between 1927 and 1939—had been praised sporadically for their style, disliked generally for their sordid subject matter, and sold hardly at all. Fame of a kind came finally in 1966 with the publication of Wide Sargasso Sea, which won her what were then two of Britain's most prestigious literary awards, one from the Royal Society of Literature, the other the W.H. Smith Prize. Rhys refused to go to either presentation ceremony. She pleaded ill health, but the truth was she was too old, too shy, and too distrustful of her fellow writers to cope with the fuss. She was also beyond caring. According to Diana Athill, her friend and publisher, her reaction to the good news was that it had come too late.
Review, 6241 words
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