Ella Gwendolyn Rees Williams. She was a mid-20th-century novelist
from the Caribbean island of Dominica.
She is best known for her novel Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), written as a prequel to Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre.
Early life She was born in Roseau, Dominica, an island
of the British West Indies. She was educated in Dominica until the age of
16, when she was sent to England to live with her aunt.
As a child, she discovered her love for writing (diaries).
AlcoholismProstitution
AbandonmentAbortion
ContradictionFeminism
“The little girl who wouldn't grow up, yet whose work depended, ultimately, upon
the maturity of experience.”
Writing career
Rhys used modified stream of consciousness to voice the experiences.
Rhys's greatest work was about a woman who is rejected by the man she loves and goes on to destroy herself.
"We can't all be happy, we can't all be rich, we can't all be lucky - and it would be so much less fun if we were... Some must cry so that others may be able to laugh the
more heartily.”
+ =
"She could give herself up to the written word as naturally as a good dancer to music or a fine swimmer to water. The only difficulty was that after finishing the last sentence she was left with a feeling at once hollow and
uncomfortably full. Exactly like indigestion."
The Left Bank and Other Stories, 1927
Voyage in the Dark, 1934 Good Morning, Midnight,
1939 The Day They Burned
the Books, 1960 Wide Sargasso Sea, 1966 Penguin Modern Stories
1, 1969 (with others) My Day: Three Pieces,
1975 Sleep It Off Lady, 1976 Smile Please: An
Unfinished Autobiography, 1979
Rhys's life was profoundly marked by a sense of exile, loss, and alienation-dominant themes in her novels and short
stories. Despite critical acclaim at the end of her life, Rhys died in 1979 still doubting
the merit of her work.
Later years Characteristically, she remained
unimpressed by her belated ascent to literary fame, commenting, "It has come too late."
She died in Exeter on 14 May 1979, at the age of 88, before completing her autobiography, which she had begun dictating only months earlier.
In 1979, the incomplete text was published posthumously under the title, Smile Please: An Unfinished Autobiography.
“You can pretend for a long time, but one day it all falls away and you are “alone. We are alone in the most
beautiful place in the world.”
2. Why does the story begin with such a long description of the stones? What do you think each stone refers to, in real life?
3. What guesses can you make about how the woman feels about this place? What her relationship to the place is like?
7. Do you think the woman is alive or not? Why? Tell examples from the story that support your thoughts.
8. What do you think the next fragment from the story refers to?
"Very fair children, as Europeans born in the West Indies so often are: as if
the white blood is asserting itself against all the odds."