As a play about her bleak life and work shows, the novelist Jean Rhys was ahead of her times. Lilian Pizzichini on a troubled exile who speaks to immigrants everywhere
The novelist Jean Rhys died alone 24 years ago in a nursing home in Devon just before her 89th birthday. The story of how she got there has been told many times, not least by herself. But her books remain largely unread. The usual starting point for readers discovering Jean Rhys is the last novel she wrote, Wide Sargasso Sea. In it, she tells the story of the first Mrs Rochester in Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre, and how it was that a lonely Anglo-Caribbean girl ended up, savage and delirious, locked in a room in the remote English countryside. Sometimes, readers leave it there. It's scary, visceral stuff. But Rhys was a brave woman and the parallels with her own life are clear. Like her most famous creation, she was oppressed by voices from her past and by the colonial experience that gave rise to them. At times, they drove her mad.
In her new play, After Mrs Rochester, which she also directs, the writer Polly Teale has found the ideal subject matter for the Shared Experience theatre company's powerful, imaginative approach. Rhys's madness is grimly transfixing, and the play cleverly conveys the sense of Rhys always observing herself, too. Her life makes good copy, but there is far more to her than that. Her five novels and four collections of short stories explore the raw underbelly of European city life. In terms of what she finds there, her themes - immigration, alienation, colonialism and exile - are vital to a more complete understanding of ourselves.
But her life story continues to be told because it isn't just in her work that Rhys was a pioneer of modern urbanism. She was born Ella Gwendolen Rees Williams to a white Creole mother and a Welsh-born doctor in Roseau, on the Windward island of Dominica. As a white girl in a predominantly black community, she felt socially and intellectually isolated. The white colonialists were stiff and disapproving - always suspecting that her family was more black than white; the children of their black servants sneered at the lonely child, calling her "white cockroach". In 1907, she left the island for schooling in England. She had read Dickens and the Brontes, but never got over the shock of the cold, grey streets of London and the hungry-looking, bedraggled men and women who stalked them. The Caribbean had shaped her sensibility, and she remained, throughout her life, nostalgic for the vitality of its people. But there was also violence and torpor in the tropics and fearful stories of zombies and female werewolves. The spirit of the place haunts her fiction.
After a desultory attempt at completing her education, Rhys became a chorus girl in musical comedies and then - it was a natural progression - the mistress of a rich man. In 1919, she married a Bel- gian conman and ended up in the Par- isian demi-monde - the closest she ever got to home. Here she met the novelist and uber-modernist Ford Madox Ford, who took her on as his protegee and mistress. He also gave her a new name: Jean Rhys, he decided, sounded "modern".
My favourite novel by Jean Rhys is Voyage in the Dark, which draws heavily on her life. Anna Morgan is a friendless young woman from the Caribbean newly arrived in Edwardian London. She is what the French call a "flaneuse" - an idler adrift in the city. As a woman, she brings female preoccupations to the role. Pretty frocks, romantic novels and stolen kisses confirm our heroine's notions of femininity. But memories of the Caribbean intrude on her surroundings, and bring a fierce passion to her story, hinting at an intensity of which Anna might be capable. Like her author, she takes a job as a chorus girl, falls in love with a wealthy man and becomes his mistress. The girls she meets are spunky cockney sparrows who've seen it all before. They are fizzing with bravado and youthful vigour. But Anna feels oppressed by the endless parade of provincial theatres and streets filled with smoke the same colour as the sky. Her lover leaves her, she has an abortion. The novel ends with a curt premonition of more desperate love affairs for Anna, and that can only mean more rejection, more anger.
Voyage in the Dark was published in 1934 to mixed reviews. Rhys's contemporaries were startled by this disturbing new voice which tackled such "sordid" subject matter. In part as a response to their perceived disapproval, in part through poverty and dejection, she took herself off to the depths of suburbia, where she engaged in violent brawls with her neighbours. She could not be happy. Being a wife and mother did not suit her, and her only child chose to live with her father. Literary London could not place her. Her three husbands could not cope with her violent rages, and she was periodically confined to mental asylums and once to Holloway Prison. Her fear of being an outcast was made real, over and over again.
What she brought to her writing was the rage, despair and humiliation of the outsider as it is played out in the central relationship of colonial and coloniser. Rhys speaks to immigrants everywhere. The bewildered newcomer shivering under heavy bedclothes in a draughty boarding house or struggling to emulate the smooth urbanity of blase Londoners. But more than that, she explores the tensions between black and white, child and parent, woman and man, sex and money. She watches the alien race of city dwellers teeming around her. Her heroines are part of the throng - both literally and euphemistically, they are streetwalkers. The soft, fluttering creatures of Edwardian melodrama are forced to jostle against the sharp, concrete edges of hostile cityscapes, never belonging, never going anywhere. Women today might take up kick-boxing, and men might know better than to mess with us, but both sexes coexist in a sexual marketplace. My biography of Rhys will be called The Blue Hour, which is the name of her favourite perfume - L'Heure Bleue by Guerlain. It is also the twilight hour, what she called "the hour between the lapdog and the wolf", when she started drinking.
There are not many writers like Rhys loitering on the edges of respectable British society, scornful of its hypocrisy, resentful of its secret codes, yet longing to be a part of it. In everything she did, she explores and delineates the rigid social hierarchies that will not admit her. She describes harrowing mental states, sociopathy and lawlessness, racism, self-loathing, abusive relationships. They are issues that Jerry Springer or Kilroy-Silk might tackle, but they won't go away.
By the time her greatest novel, Wide Sargasso Sea, was published, in 1966, Jean Rhys was an old woman. She complained that fame and financial security had come "too late". She refused to be comforted because that would mean abandoning her vision. And bleak as it was, it was her life.
After Mrs Rochester, written and directed by Polly Teale, is at the Lyric Hammersmith, London W6 (08700 500 511) until 10 May; Arts Theatre, Cambridge (01223 503 333) from 13-17 May; and Yvonne Arnaud Theatre, Guildford (01483 44 00 00) from 20-24 May
Lilian Pizzichini is writing a biography of Jean Rhys
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