Jean Rhys blue plaque unveiled.
In 1939 Jean Rhys, the author of four great novels, went missing, believed dead. She was found in 1958, living in great poverty, and in 1966, at the age of 76, she published her masterpiece Wide Sargasso Sea. Her disappearance had lasted nearly 20 years; and when money and fame came at last, it was, she said, too late.
On Tuesday one of London’s famous blue plaques was unveiled to her – 33 years after her death. Her second disappearance had lasted even longer than the first. When I wrote a biography of her 22 years ago, I had letters from an army of passionate Rhys readers, most of them young women. What has happened since then?
There was a new short portrait of her, by Lilian Pizzichini, in 2009. There have been two films, and even an opera, of Wide Sargasso Sea, and it was named as one of the best 100 novels by Time. It remains on many A-level courses, although only as an adjunct to Jane Eyre; and on almost every university course in women’s studies and postcolonial studies, again together with Jane Eyre.
So she hasn’t disappeared – or Wide Sargasso Sea hasn’t. But I don’t think Jean would be happy. She invented the prequel, but as a result her most famous book is only read because of another. And if Wide Sargasso Sea is a masterpiece, so are Voyage in the Dark and Good Morning, Midnight. But when I ask at Blackwell’s and Waterstones in Oxford, they both give me the same answer: Wide Sargasso Sea sells well, the others hardly at all.
The others are pure Jean Rhys, without the leavening of history, or the connection to an English classic. Rhys is too much for most English readers. They still can’t stomach me, I hear her say, without that smug English cow Jane Eyre. I wish I’d never written that damn book.
Twenty years ago I felt she spoke for me, and so did my readers. But things have changed. Jean Rhys speaks for the powerless, and women are no longer powerless. And she wrote as a white West Indian, before black British writers became a large and vibrant group. Do young women still read Jean Rhys? Do young black people?
My sample is tiny, but it’s clear. Yes, young women read her, and young black readers and especially writers read her, and many become passionate fans.
But they are all, as one young woman put it, “literary types”. The young women who wrote to me 20 years ago were “literary types” too. So perhaps little has changed, after all.
On Tuesday 30 or 40 people came, and as the blue and white plaque was unveiled a quick breath ran through us all. There it was: Jean Rhys, writer, lived here in Flat 22, Paultons Square, Chelsea, 1936-38.
Afterwards we brought out a bottle of champagne and toasted Jean Rhys, lifting our plastic glasses to her plaque. Has her luck finally changed?
Then Jo, a friend of hers, brought over something she’d promised to show me: an evening dress of Jean’s youth, which she had left her. It was lovely and impossibly small. “I’ve tried to give it to Tulsa,” Jo said (most of Jean Rhys’s papers are kept at the University of Tulsa). “But they don’t seem to want it.” No, nothing has changed.