I Used to Live Here Once: The Haunted Life of Jean Rhys

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Each reappearance seemed to be as a different writer: a woman, a modernist, and finally a West Indian. Crossing the water The first half is mostly about her island upbringing and her love affairs with the sons of the governor of the bank of england and Lenglet and Ford Madox Ford, which are more interesting than her later life, where she's taken care of but also in a sense held captive by influential women in England's publishing industry. Would've liked to see more on her interactions with the Lost Generation writers, but it seems like she didn't leave her biographers much to work with.

Opening the biography with the words of the creole song that Jean Rhys sang for a recording in 1963 (a digital version is held with Rhys’ papers at the McFarlin Library, University of Tulsa) sets the scene of Rhys’ life and yearnings beyond the Europe and England with which she has been mostly associated. An intimate, revealing and profoundly moving biography of Jean Rhys, acclaimed author of Wide Sargasso Sea. This is a little disappointing as a modern biography of Rhys, principally because there don't seem seem to be many sources of information and so Seymour has recourse to Rhys' own Smile Please, her unfinished autobiography. It seems that letters didn't survive though there are Rhys' notebooks - whatever the reason, there is little that I learned here that isn't already part of the Rhys life. In a late short story by Jean Rhys, a woman sees a pair of children standing near a house that is very familiar to her, by an exotic, flowering tree. “I used to live here once,” she tells them. They can’t see that she’s there; she is a ghost, haunting her old home. This story lends its title to Miranda Seymour’s new biography, which places Rhys’s upbringing in the Caribbean at the centre of the narrative. She was born Ella Gwendolen Rees Williams in 1890, the daughter of a Welsh doctor and a white Creole mother descended from slaveowners on the island of Dominica, “[t]he island which haunted her mind and almost everything that she wrote” and “the wellspring of Rhys’s art”. For the rest of her life Rhys would feel as though she belonged nowhere – not on the island where she felt so at home, and not in England, where she would always be seen as an outsider, her very voice, with its “seemingly ineradicable island lilt” betraying her origins.Who did she think she is?’ asked Ray. ‘Acting as if she still lived here. What did she think of the spare room?’ He fancied he heard the sound of faint laughter and wasn’t sure where it was coming from. It might have been his own. The moon had vanished behind the clouds. He wondered when he would see it again. Ray slept well, despite the roar of Storm Brenda battering the trees against the windows. Sandra woke several times in the night. Once she fancied she heard the stairs creak. Later she saw Rosalind climbing into the wardrobe. She knew she was dreaming, but was glad of Ray’s comforting bulk beside her. Harry 1 Alterations: Comparing the Changes Caused by Marriage of the two Bessie Head Short Stories, "Life" and "Snapshots of a Wedding " Marriage is the union of two people, traditionally husband and wife. Traditional also are the roles that women play when confined in a marriage. When a woman has had the opportunity to educate herself pass tradition and has been use to a fast-paced modern ... The last point of view is the most frightening of all the other aspects. There is a possibility that this story, rather than being a simple ghost story, is a realistic story about how individuals like Jean Rhys were ignored or overlooked in the West Indies. People like Jean Rhys just did not fit in.

That intimacy is important. It ties Phillips’ novel into a legacy of Caribbean writing about and in response to Rhys. This includes work by writers such as Derek Walcott, Lorna Goodison and Jamaica Kincaid, who valued Rhys’ engagement with the particularities of loss and language and imagination, because they stood “on the periphery of the English-language tradition”.In I Used to Live Here Once by Jean Rhys we have the theme of struggle, connection, freedom, change, acceptance and loneliness. Narrated in the third person by an unnamed narrator the reader realises after reading the story that Rhys may be exploring the theme of struggle. As the narrator is describing the stepping stones that the woman once walked across Rhys appears to be using each stone to suggest that at times the woman has struggled to get from one side of the river to the other. Symbolically Rhys could be using the river. In particular the water to suggest that in life the woman has also struggled. She has had both good times and bad times. Though it is interesting that the woman does successfully manage to navigate her way across the river. This could be important as Rhys may be suggesting that the struggles that the woman encountered no longer hinder her. She is free. The fact that the road is also wider could be important as Rhys could be highlighting the fact that there have been changes in the woman’s life. The die for all this was cast in Rhys’s childhood on the island that inspired her 1966 Jane Eyre prequel, Wide Sargasso Sea . By then a British colony, of its population of 29,000, fewer than 100 were white (her mother, who whipped her until she was 12, was Creole; her father was a Welshman), and she always felt like an outsider, “a changeling, a ghostly revenant”. Dominica was not an entirely hospitable place for a girl like her, taunted on the streets, felt up at home. Voodoo was practised, and Rhys’s nursemaid spoke of zombies that could open any door – stories that foreshadow the final years of her life when, figuratively speaking, reanimated corpses were indeed all around, and she was persecuted as a witch by the children in her Devon village. In depicting the long, often tortured life of author Jean Rhys in I USED TO LIVE HERE ONCE, British biographer Miranda Seymour has found metaphor and meaning in the development of a dynamic woman, a feminist and deep thinker who was rarely able to fully enjoy the fruits of her labor.

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A Dominican story

There is an intermingling of the paranormal and realism in this story, especially where racism is concerned. This is a short but concise story or narrative piece. Still, it is remarkably evocative, especially the last line, where Rhys mentions that she realized the issue after the children did not react to her. Did they not respond to her because she was a ghost or because of her race? We remember from her biography that Rhys always had a problem everywhere she went because of her accent. In this story, she tries to reach out to the children through her voice. However, they do not seem to notice her presence. Did they realize her parentage from her accent and therefore ignored her? Was she a ghost and only realized it when the children did not respond to her? This story leaves us with many questions, but they are intriguing questions all the same.