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Abstract
Despite Rhys’s refusal to have a biography written about her, her own life has been the subject of quite a number of memoirs, biographies or portraits: from David Plante’s early, personal and subversive reminiscences of his time and work with her at the end of her life, to the perhaps more consensual Jean Rhys: Life and Work by Carole Angier in 1990, to the more recent memoirs by Alexis Lykiard, Jean Rhys Revisited (2000) and Jean Rhys: Afterwords (2006) or the latest, The Blue Hour by Lilian Pizzichini (Citation2009). These biographies and memoirs may be considered as transmission lines, contributing to the aura of a writer no less than other pieces of criticism. Because Rhys’s fiction was considered as autobiographical, the point of writing biographies should precisely be to differentiate facts from fiction. I shall ponder in this article on the reasons why some biographies are considered as ‘good’ and others ‘bad’, what makes a biography a ‘worthy’ recording of a writer’s life and work. This overview of Rhys’s biographies will be an opportunity to reflect on the evolution of the genre itself and its ability to transmit personality truthfully in a post-modern era when the pitfalls and drawbacks of the genre have been extensively debated by biographical theoreticians and when truth and personality seem more than ever like two very complex and perhaps inimical notions.
Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 This “exhaustion” of the genre provided the title for a recent analysis of biography by Vincent Broqua and Guillaume Marche (eds), L'Épuisement du biographique, Newcastle Upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2010.
2 On this aspect in particular see Aude Haffen and Lucie Guiheneuf (eds), Writers’ Biographies and Family Histories in 20th- and 21st- Century Literature, Newcastle Upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, Citation2018, p. 6–9. See also Robert Dion and Frédéric Regard (eds), Les Nouvelles Écritures biographiques, Lyon: ENS Éditions, Citation2013.
3 The term was coined by the French specialist of biography Daniel Madelénat in 1984. See Daniel Madelénat, La Biographie, Paris, PUF, Citation1984, or more recently ‘Moi, biographe: m’as-tu vu?’, Revue de littérature comparée, Citation2008, at www.cairn.info/revue-de-litterature-comparee-2008-1-page-95.html (accessed 20 April 2018).
4 Claire Tomalin hailed it as ‘the definitive biography, deeply researched, subtle and just towards its great appalling subject’ (quotation from the cover of the 1990 Penguin Edition of Carole Angier, Jean Rhys: Life and Work).
5 For instance, it may be argued that the fact that Angier never travelled to Dominica is a serious hindrance to her understanding Rhys.
6 The edition used for this article is the English paperback edition published by Bloomsbury Publishing in 2010. For a comment on the difference between portrait and biography see for instance Elaine Showalter's review of The Blue Hour, where she justifies the British title by saying ‘a “portrait”, after all, is more subjective and intimate than a biography.’ Elaine Showalter, ‘The Blue Hour by Lilian Pizzichini’, The Guardian, 22 August Citation2009 at www.theguardian.com/books/2009/aug/22/the-blue-hour-review (accessed 8 April 2018).
7 ‘She wrote. She wrote. She wrote […] [W]hat can the biographer do when his subject has put him in the predicament into which Orlando has now put us? […] Life […] is the only fit subject for novelist or biographer; life […] has nothing whatever to do with sitting on a chair and thinking. Thought and life are poles asunder’ (Woolf Citation1928: 240).
8 Even Rhys herself, in the process of writing her own autobiography, had to make sure she had not already put the material in one of her fictions. David Plante claimed: ‘she often had me check to make sure a passage she thought of using in her autobiography hadn’t already been used in one of her novels or short stories. I did my best, but I, too, couldn’t always remember’ (Plante Citation1983: 51).
9 For more on writing Rhys's biography as “a tricky proposition” see Lauren Elkin's review of The Blue Hour. ‘When a Biography is not a Biography. The Blue Hour: A Life of Jean Rhys’, The Quarterly Conversation, 17 Nov. Citation2010, at www.powells.com/post/reviewaday/when-a-biography-is-not-a-biography (accessed 10 March 2018).
10 This is the title Angier chose for the third part of her biography of Jean Rhys (Angier Citation1992: 409).
11 Of all of Rhys’s biographers only Angier seems to have been granted access to the Special Collections of the McFarlin Library (University of Tulsa).
12 David Plante’s portrait starts in December 1975 and ends very shortly before Rhys’s death, although the chronology is not very clear-cut and Plante’s last reflections on Rhys are posthumous. Conversely, Lykiard dates his encounter with Rhys and has his testimony start in 1969. Their friendship must have lasted four years, until Lykiard had to sell his bungalow in Devon and moved to a Greek island in 1973. He was away when Rhys died in 1979 but came back to England shortly after her death.
13 On Plante as a ghost-writer see Erica L. Johnson, ‘Auto-Ghostwriting Smile Please: An Unfinished Autobiography’, Biography 29: 4, Fall Citation2006, p. 564–66 and on the generic indeterminacy of Plante’s memoir, Floriane Reviron-Piégay, ‘Souriez, s'il vous plaît de Jean Rhys: l’originalité du texte des origines ou le récit d’enfance en question’, Voix contemporaines 1, Citation2019, p. 2–4 at https://voixcontemporaines.msh-lse.fr/node/107 (accessed 12 March 2020).
14 Sonia Orwell and Germaine Greer were the other ‘difficult women’: Plante’s portrait of Greer amply justified her describing biography as ‘rape … an unpardonable crime against selfhood’ (quoted by Kaplan Citation1996: 6).
15 ‘Once something had been written out, [Rhys] said, it was done with and one could start again from the beginning’ (Athill Citation1981: 6).
16 I use the ‘figure of prosopopeia’ here as Paul de Man has defined it in his seminal essay ‘Autobiography as De-Facement’, that is to say as ‘the fiction of an apostrophe to an absent, deceased or voiceless entity, which posits the possibility of the latter’s reply and confers upon it the power of speech’ (De Man Citation1984: 75-76).
17 ‘That is the mystery of Jean Rhys. I was so struck by her mystery that I became her biographer. That did not solve the mystery, of course, but confirmed it’ (Angier Citation2000: V).
18 The very first chapter is not devoted to Rhys’s birth but to her trip back to Dominica. Rhys’s birth is alluded to in the second chapter and it may be argued that the return to Dominica is nevertheless a metaphor of the return to the origins, thus an apt beginning for a traditional biography.
19 This is Virginia Woolf’s way of phrasing the almost impossible aim of biography: ‘welding into a seamless whole’ truth, ‘something of granite-like solidity’ and personality, ‘something of rainbow-like intangibility’; Woolf admitted that ‘the problem [was] a stiff one’ (Woolf Citation1967: 229).
20 This volume was the result of the first international British Conference on Jean Rhys, gathered in July 2010 at King’s College London, and jointly organised with Anglia Ruskin University. ‘The fascination with Rhys’s life and writing has not waned. Not only do her novels appear regularly on university syllabi, but she still haunts the popular cultural imagination, […] new biographies appear, such as Lilian Pizzichini’s The Blue Hour’ (Baxter et al. Citation2012: 408).
21 Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea was read in ten episodes on BBC Radio 4 from 3 July to 15 July 2017.