cover image Jean Rhys: Life and Work

Jean Rhys: Life and Work

Carole Angier, Carole Angler. Little Brown and Company, $35 (762pp) ISBN 978-0-316-04263-5

In 1973 critic Al Alvarez called her the best living English novelist, and in the same year PW reported a ``rush'' on her novels, among them Quartet, Voyage in the Dark and her masterpiece, Wide Sargasso Sea. Rhys (1890-1979) was an odd bundle of qualities that included narcissism, paranoia, charm, self-pity, self-destructiveness, rage against men and a general wildness of temperament that owed something to the steamy island of Dominica where she was born. But as British freelance writer Angier amply shows in this hefty critical biography--where fact and insight lie cheek by jowl--she was adept at ``distilling truth out of evasion and art out of pain.'' For her (and her heroines), loving meant losing, a lesson acquired through several marriages and passionate affairs, the most formative, from the literary point of view, with Ford Madox Ford. Perhaps this impressive study will trigger another rush on a poetic novelist now suffering a mild neglect. Photos. (June)