Biography Essay

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...