I Used to Live Here Once

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Memories of a conflicted Caribbean childhood haunt the four fictions that Jean Rhys wrote during her extraordinary years as an exile in 1920s Paris and later in England.

But until now no biographer has researched the crucial seventeen years that Rhys spent living on the remote island of Dominica.

Throughout her life Jean Rhys experienced tragedy and extreme poverty, alcohol and drug dependency, romantic and sexual turmoil – yet she was never a victim, and all these experiences became grist for her writing. This biography by Miranda Seymour reveals a self-mocking, self-absorbed, unpredictable, often darkly funny and fiercely independent artist.

‘Brilliantly written, compulsively readable and insightful, Miranda Seymour’s biography does full justice to a remarkable and complex life’ Pat Barker

Voyage in the Dark

Patricia Cleveland-Peck on the novels of Jean Rhys

Good Morning, Midnight is in fact the fourth in a series of novels that draw largely on Jean Rhys’s own life. Sasha Jansen is a lonely, ageing alcoholic who, at the instigation of a worried friend,...

Not-so-gay Paree

Rowena Macdonald on Jean Rhys, Quartet and Voyage in the Dark

I first read Jean Rhys in my mid-teens; a copy of Quartet from my parents’ bookshelf, which drew me with its undemanding slimness and its cover featuring the beautiful face of Isabelle Adjani in...

The Orchid Man

Miranda Seymour on Jocelyn Brooke, The Scapegoat

I owe the discovery of The Passing of a Hero and Conventional Weapons to a fellow-visitor to the London Library who, shrewdly interpreting the glazed stare of a fellow shelf-crawler, urged me to make...

The Twilight Hour

Miranda Seymour on Peter Davidson, The Last of the Light

Davidson’s book offers us a series of intense, lyrical and surprisingly moving meditations on landscapes, buildings and mythical settings, as seen at the close of day through the eyes of painters...