Jean Rhys claimed to have been born in 1894, but it is more probable that she was born on 24 August 1890. The daughter of Rhys Williams, a doctor, and Minna Lockhart, Ella Gwen Rhys Williams was born in Roseau, Dominica, an island in the Lesser Antilles. Her father was Welsh and her mother a third-generation Dominican Creole, and this Creole heritage was a strong influence in Jean Rhys 's life and in her writing. Also strongly influential were the religious training she received in a convent school and the firsthand knowledge of Negro culture that she gained from servants. Her imagination was further shaped by her deep attraction to the black culture--the warmth, the color, the music--and the racial mixture of the islands; but the cultural contrasts between colonial and native life, as the intensely private Rhys experienced them, also contributed to the restless uncertainty of her identity.

Jean Rhys...