“I like shape very much. A novel has to have shape, and life doesn't have any.”
Author detail
Jean Rhys, born Ella Gwendolyn Rees Williams in 1890, was a 20th-century novelist and writer of short stories. Born and raised on the Caribbean island of Dominica, she moved to England at age 16, became a chorus girl, and embarked on the life of a demimondaine there and in Europe. Her deep sense of being an outsider -- the descendant of white colonialists in the Caribbean, then a Creole in England -- never left her and deeply informed her work. Rhys's evocative sketches in the 1920s caught the eye, and briefly earned the patronage, of Ford Madox Ford (her fraught relationship with him is explored in her debut novel, Quartet [1928]). She is best known for her novel Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), which examined the character of Bertha Rochester (in Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre) from a different angle.
Quotes
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“I like shape very much. A novel has to have shape, and life doesn't have any.”
“There are always two deaths, the real one and the one people know about.”
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“I prayed, but the words fell to the ground meaning nothing.”
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“Not that she objected to solitude. Quite the contrary. She had books, thank Heaven, quantities of books. All sorts of books.”