The Blue Hour: A Life of Jean Rhys

The Blue Hour: A Life of Jean Rhys PDF Author: Lilian Pizzichini
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393079392
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 337

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Book Description
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.

The Blue Hour: A Life of Jean Rhys

The Blue Hour: A Life of Jean Rhys PDF Author: Lilian Pizzichini
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393079392
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 337

Get Book

Book Description
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.

The Blue Hour

The Blue Hour PDF Author: Lilian Pizzichini
Publisher: Bloomsbury Paperbacks
ISBN: 9781408801222
Category : Novelists, English
Languages : en
Pages : 322

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Book Description
Jean Rhys was an artist of brilliance and fury best known for her late literary masterpiece, Wide Sargasso Sea. But she was also a woman in constant psychological turmoil, whose blazing talent rescued her time and time again from the abyss. Lilian Pizzichini follows Rhys from her girlhood in Dominica, through three failed marriages and five misunderstood books, up to her death in 1979. This is an unforgettable portrait of a woman whose writing was both her life and her lifeline.

Jean Rhys

Jean Rhys PDF Author: Carole Angier
Publisher: Faber & Faber
ISBN: 9780571276417
Category : Caribbean Area
Languages : en
Pages : 792

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Book Description
'An acute literary intelligence ... the reader comes to trust instinctively Angier's assessments.' New York Times Jean Rhys (1890-1979) had a long life of great difficulty. So inept was she in its management that her authority as the writer of five beautifully shaped and controlled novels appears mysterious: how could someone so bad at living be so good at writing about it? Carole Angier answers this question. Jean Rhys never denied that she used her own experience in her writings, but no one hitherto has understood so well the nature of, and reasons for, this use. On her way to understanding, Carole Angier discovered more about the life than seemed possible. Jean Rhys's childhood, her momentous first love affair, her three marriages, the disasters which befell her husbands, her drinking and its consequences: all are shown with unsparing clarity. Equally clearly, and more importantly, we see the dynamics of her personality as it underwent, and sometimes provoked, these experiences. Sometimes what is revealed is shocking; but Carole Angier's sympathy and compassion dispel dismay, and her brilliant demonstrations of how art was made of events and emotions restores admiration on foundations which are stronger than ever. Jean Rhys did not want anyone to write about her, but this first full biography put beyond question her standing as a great writer of our time, written with an intensity and clarity which mirrors her own. It is a work of exceptional intimacy, sensitivity and power. 'Remarkable, the definitive biography. It is deeply researched, subtle, sympathetic.' Claire Tomalin Independent on Sunday 'Mesmerising.' Washington Post

Good Morning, Midnight

Good Morning, Midnight PDF Author: Jean Rhys
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 9780393303940
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 202

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Book Description
A woman encounters a life filled with desires and emotions when she returns to Paris after suffering from a bout of depression and alcoholism in London.

Wide Sargasso Sea

Wide Sargasso Sea PDF Author: Jean Rhys
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 9780393308808
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 196

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Book Description
"A considerable tour de force by any standard." ?New York Times Book Review"

After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie

After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie PDF Author: Jean Rhys
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 9780393315479
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 196

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Book Description
Julia Martin is in Paris and at the end of her rope. Once beautiful, she was taken care of by men. Now after being dropped by her latest lover, she visits London to see her ailing mother and meets up with her distrustful sister, Norah. This is a haunting picture of two desperate women in a desperate predicament.

Smile Please

Smile Please PDF Author: Jean Rhys
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780141984544
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :

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Book Description


The Left Bank and Other Stories

The Left Bank and Other Stories PDF Author: Jean Rhys
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 256

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Book Description


A View of the Empire at Sunset

A View of the Empire at Sunset PDF Author: Caryl Phillips
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN: 0374718504
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 336

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Book Description
Award-winning author Caryl Phillips presents a biographical novel of the life of Jean Rhys, the author of Wide Sargasso Sea, which she wrote as a prequel to Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre. Caryl Phillips’s A View of the Empire at Sunset is the sweeping story of the life of the woman who became known to the world as Jean Rhys. Born Ella Gwendolyn Rees Williams in Dominica at the height of the British Empire, Rhys lived in the Caribbean for only sixteen years before going to England. A View of the Empire at Sunset is a look into her tempestuous and unsatisfactory life in Edwardian England, 1920s Paris, and then again in London. Her dream had always been to one day return home to Dominica. In 1936, a forty-five-year-old Rhys was finally able to make the journey back to the Caribbean. Six weeks later, she boarded a ship for England, filled with hostility for her home, never to return. Phillips’s gripping new novel is equally a story about the beginning of the end of a system that had sustained Britain for two centuries but that wreaked havoc on the lives of all who lived in the shadow of the empire: both men and women, colonizer and colonized. A true literary feat, A View of the Empire at Sunset uncovers the mysteries of the past to illuminate the predicaments of the present, getting at the heart of alienation, exile, and family by offering a look into the life of one of the greatest storytellers of the twentieth century and retelling a profound story that is singularly its own.

The Collected Short Stories

The Collected Short Stories PDF Author: Jean Rhys
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 9780393306255
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 420

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Book Description
Jean Rhys was one of the twentieth century's foremost writers, a literary artist who made exqusite use of the raw material of her own often turbulent life to create fiction of memorable resonance and poignancy. Here for the first time in one volume are her complete stories.