author
Jean Rhys
1890–1979
Born in Dominica and shaped by life in both the Caribbean and Europe, this sharply observant novelist became famous for fiction that gives voice to outsiders. Her best-known book, Wide Sargasso Sea, returned her to major literary attention after a long silence.
1 Audiobook
Quartet
by Jean Rhys
About the author
Born Ella Gwendoline Rees Williams in Roseau, Dominica, on August 24, 1890, she spent her early years in the Caribbean before being sent to England as a teenager. That split between places, cultures, and identities would become one of the strongest currents in her fiction.
She published novels and stories in the 1920s and 1930s, often writing about women living on the margins, with a style that is spare, intimate, and emotionally precise. After many years out of the spotlight, she returned with Wide Sargasso Sea in 1966, a novel that reimagines the story behind the "madwoman in the attic" from Jane Eyre and is now widely seen as her masterpiece.
Her work is admired for its sensitivity to loneliness, displacement, and power, as well as for the way her Caribbean background reshaped English literary traditions. She died in Exeter, England, on May 14, 1979.