Jean Rhys (post 1): Best known as author of Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), a prequel to Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847), is said to have identity issues

I plan to read Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys.

“She is a writer of many identities and aspects” (1, p. xi).

“Jean Rhys was a pen name…She was christened Ella Gwendoline Rees Williams…Gwendolen is the spelling on her tombstone, and the one she used in her autobiography…she hated the name Gwendolen (which she learned means white in Welsh), just as she hated being the palest of her siblings: they had brown eyes and hair, and she had blue eyes, fair skin and lighter hair… 

“Dominica, where she was born… still a wildly beautiful island…was a colony of Britain with a long history of slavery and white English hegemony. But, unusually in the Caribbean at the time, this was challenged by a powerful, mixed race elite…She was perhaps of mixed race, not uncommon among Creoles, but an issue for Rhys’s mother’s family, who liked to think their bloodline was only English…Rhys’s father was Welsh.” 

“She had a dark-skinned nurse, Meta, who often played on her child’s credulity, and told her terrifying stories of spirits and demons…Rhys was contradictory about race…there is a sense of forbidden love across racial caste lines…in Wide Sargasso Sea. Then, in the Black Exercise Book, she wrote of being sexually and psychologically abused by an old Englishman, Mr. Howard…The narrative of a young female victim of sexual abuse is clearly one source of the sexual inhibition or emotional masochism that most of Rhys’s protagonists display…” (1, pp. 1-4).

“Rhys adopted a first name as her writing name, which, depending on the context, could signify either gender (Jean as French is a man’s name, and as English a woman’s)” (1, p. 19).

“Rhys’s major characters often have a contradictory and hardly stable sense of self” (1, p. 22).

1. Elaine Savory. The Cambridge Introduction to Jean Rhys. Cambridge, UK, Cambridge University Press, 2009.