Writing Jean Rhys a Life: The Circumvolutions of Transmission Lines in the Memoirs and Biographies of Jean Rhys

Abstract

Despite Rhys’s refusal to have a biography written about her, her own life has been the subject of quite a number of memoirs, biographies or portraits: from David Plante’s early, personal and subversive reminiscences of his time and work with her at the end of her life, to the perhaps more consensual Jean Rhys: Life and Work by Carole Angier in 1990, to the more recent memoirs by Alexis Lykiard, Jean Rhys Revisited (2000) and Jean Rhys: Afterwords (2006) or the latest, The Blue Hour by Lilian Pizzichini (2009). These biographies and memoirs may be considered as transmission lines, contributing to the aura of a writer no less than other pieces of criticism. Because Rhys’s fiction was considered as autobiographical, the point of writing biographies should precisely be to differentiate facts from fiction. I shall ponder in this article on the reasons why some biographies are considered as ‘good’ and others ‘bad’, what makes a biography a ‘worthy’ recording of a writer’s life and work. This overview of Rhys’s biographies will be an opportunity to reflect on the evolution of the genre itself and its ability to transmit personality truthfully in a post-modern era when the pitfalls and drawbacks of the genre have been extensively debated by biographical theoreticians and when truth and personality seem more than ever like two very complex and perhaps inimical notions.