British actress Diana Quick brings her aristocratic voice and impeccable pacing to this biography of the writer Jean Rhys. Most known for her mesmerizing novel WIDE SARGASSO SEA, Rhys was as extraordinary as the women in her work. Of mixed Welsh, Scots, and Creole descent, she was raised on the Caribbean island of Dominica. After moving to England at age 16, she lived a fascinating independent life—unusual for the time—which included mistress situations, several marriages, children, alcoholism, and poverty. Quick deftly captures Rhys’s Dominican Creole-English when narrating autobiographical passages. Her prodigious dramatic skills are on full display in the many excerpts of dialogue and narrative from Rhys’s novels. Listeners will be inspired to discover (or revisit) the writings of Jean Rhys. J.E.S. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award © AudioFile 2022, Portland, Maine
I Used to Live Here Once: The Haunted Life of Jean Rhys
Narrated by Diana Quick
Miranda SeymourUnabridged — 14 hours, 9 minutes
I Used to Live Here Once: The Haunted Life of Jean Rhys
Narrated by Diana Quick
Miranda SeymourUnabridged — 14 hours, 9 minutes
Audiobook (Digital)
Free with a B&N Audiobooks Subscription | Cancel Anytime
Already Subscribed?
Sign in to Your BN.com Account
Related collections and offers
FREE
with a B&N Audiobooks Subscription
Overview
Jean Rhys is one of the most compelling writers of the twentieth century. Memories of her Caribbean girlhood haunt the four short and piercingly brilliant novels that Rhys wrote during her extraordinary years as an exile in 1920s Paris and later in England, a body of fiction-above all, the extraordinary Wide Sargasso Sea-that has a passionate following today. And yet her own colorful life, including her early years on the Caribbean island of Dominica, remains too little explored, until now.
In I Used to Live Here Once, Miranda Seymour sheds new light on the artist whose proud and fiercely solitary life profoundly informed her writing. Rhys experienced tragedy and extreme poverty, alcohol and drug dependency, romantic and sexual turmoil, all of which contributed to the "Rhys woman" of her oeuvre. Today, readers still intuitively relate to her unforgettable characters, vulnerable, watchful, and often alarmingly disaster-prone outsiders; women with a different way of moving through the world. And yet, while her works often contain autobiographical material, Rhys herself was never a victim. The figure who emerges for Seymour is cultured, self-mocking, unpredictable-and shockingly contemporary.
Editorial Reviews
04/25/2022
Critic Seymour (A Ring of Conspirators) delivers a fastidious biography of British author Jean Rhys (1890–1979), who lived an “extraordinary and often reckless life, one that took her from poverty... to eventual recognition as perhaps the finest English woman novelist of the twentieth century.” Rhys authored complex and oft-controversial female protagonists, Seymour notes: her 1931 novel After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie, for example, featured a “morally dubious heroine” and was considered a “waste of talent” by critics. Seymour makes a convincing case that criticism of Rhys’s work was “focused upon the connection between the author herself and the... more victimised women about whom she wrote,” and is comprehensive in her coverage of Rhys’s struggles with mental illness and addiction: “She had begun drinking so heavily during 1934 that she couldn’t write. And without her writing, she went to pieces.” Photographs and letters enrich the text, and Seymour’s perspective leaves plenty of room for curiosity: “Questions abound. How much of the material on which Rhys seems to draw... was based on historical fact?” This captivating study is well worth a look for fans and scholars. (June)
"An eloquent defence of the biographer’s art in a clear-eyed yet sympathetic portrait of the extraordinary life of a complicated, not always likeable, woman.... Seymour is clearly a Rhys aficionada, albeit a subtle one, fully cognisant of the failings of the woman. [The] greatest service a literary biographer can perform is to send the reader back to her subject’s work with fresh insight, renewed pleasure and enhanced admiration. This, Seymour achieves magnificently."
"One of the many strengths of this biography is that Seymour is aware of the danger of the too-easy read-across from fiction to life, while being alive to the hidden truths of literary archaeology.... A gem of literary biography."
"Seymour, a masterful biographer, gets to the heart of what drove the talented and tormented author of Wide Sargasso Sea.… Seymour tells her story with empathy, precision and a keen eye for the telling detail."
"Enthralling.... Seymour powerfully evokes the world from which Rhys never really escaped, one of prejudice, abuse, and abuse’s shamefaced offspring, complicity."
"Intimate and insightful. . . . [I Used to Live Here Once] is full of magics."
"An exhaustive, definitive ride around both the idea and the reality of Jean Rhys.... Authoritatively woven together, Seymour addresses a writer and woman who is at once self-absorbed and thoughtful, sardonic and sensitive, harnessing an independence that was created and sustained by circumstance, and deftly draws out the wildness of Rhys that threatened to break as well as make her. This is also a love letter to the different ways that writers work, and how they are not always disciples of discipline, how sometimes great work comes piecemeal and from the messy brutality of living. While Rhys herself wrote that she ‘would never really belong anywhere’, somehow, Seymour has brought her home."
"A first-class life and a rollicking read. Seymour skilfully interweaves the autobiographical stories and novels with the people and fortunes in Rhys’s crazily adventurous life.... The result is close to a masterpiece."
"Seymour makes a convincing case for Rhys’s intelligence and agency as an artist. The writer who emerges from these pages is not the sluttish savant of Alvarez’ fevered imagination, but a woman who fought heroically to realize her own prodigious talent and to salvage something lasting from the wreckage of her life."
"Seymour meticulously stitches Rhys’s stories to events in her life, while scrupulously maintaining the distinction Rhys herself insisted on: the women who people her fiction are not self-portraits."
"Stellar.... Seymour chronicles the heroic generosity of Rhys’ friends and family, the devastating criticism that kept Rhys from publishing her work for nearly 30 years, and her late-in-life fame, sensitively portraying Rhys in all her fury and brilliance."
"Seymour, a masterful biographer, gets to the heart of what drove the talented and tormented author of Wide Sargasso Sea.... Seymour tells her story with empathy, precision and a keen eye for the telling detail."
"Seymour’s investigations into Rhys are inseparable from her sensitive close readings of the novels. She is shrewd and careful.... [A] compelling biography."
"Since Jean Rhys’s death 42 years ago our obsession with her life and work ... has only grown.... Now it is Miranda Seymour’s turn to re-tell the story, with informative new material on her early life in the Caribbean, and a more generous tone than some of her predecessors.... Perhaps it’s that ghostly opacity that makes her such an intriguing subject—a writer on whom we can project our own fears and desires."
"Revelatory ... based on newfound documents that shed light on the elusive Dominica-born British novelist’s ‘extraordinary and often reckless life.’"
"Richly detailed, exhaustively researched, and warmly sympathetic.... The biographer’s voice in I Used to Live Here Once is a steadying principle throughout the turbulent, disjointed life of Jean Rhys, corrective when necessary, at times rueful, bemused, but never intrusive or judgmental."
"Brilliantly written, compulsively readable, and insightful, Miranda Seymour’s biography does full justice to a remarkable and complex life."
"Absolute gold. A beautiful and fascinating in-depth study of how a writer works, how books emerge from a life, from messy emotions, a Caribbean island and a uniquely sensitive imagination."
"Illuminating and meticulously researched.... Reveals how her subject’s tumultuous life informed her brilliant art."
"The multiple guises and conflicting personae of Jean Rhys—reckless and reclusive, captivating and appalling—demand a particularly agile biographer. Miranda Seymour is ideally suited to the task. An empathetic but unsparing critic, a tenacious and resourceful researcher, and a historian of literary cultures with a novelist’s sense of the evocative detail, she has produced an enthralling biography of a haunting—and maddening—modern writer."
"Slyly compelling.... The narrative has the tension of a thriller.... However precarious her existence, as she appears in this biography Rhys always maintains an obscure dominion, if not over herself, then over other people. Her intransigence, capriciousness and abiding selfishness may not be pretty, but it’s these qualities that kept her going against all the odds."
"One of Miranda Seymour’s finest biographies, this is an utterly riveting voyage into a writer’s mind. You can almost feel Jean Rhys breathing in the room, and what a ferociously complicated woman she was! I was spellbound from start to finish."
"It’s a high-wire act to hold so witty and eloquent a balance between this writer’s recklessness and diligence. The honesty too is appealing, the acknowledgement of dark places no one can fully visit."
"Miranda Seymour’s illuminating and brilliant book shows how Jean’s life—and especially the island of Dominica—informed her genius. It goes a long way towards making the reader understand, forgive and even applaud her rage—more, it explains why so many of us loved Jean, and her books."
"Miranda Seymour has written a compelling and stylish new biography of Jean Rhys, whose life and work have often been cast in melancholic shadow. Seymour adds color and complexity to Rhys’s story, and suggests the haunting influence of her early years on the Caribbean island of Dominica. This is a fresh, empathetic portrait of an iconic and unconventional woman writer whose searing novels of trauma, race, gender, and exile were ahead of their time."
"Seymour meticulously stitches Rhys’s stories to events in her life, while scrupulously maintaining the distinction Rhys herself insisted on: the women who people her fiction are not self-portraits."
British actress Diana Quick brings her aristocratic voice and impeccable pacing to this biography of the writer Jean Rhys
Seymour powerfully evokes the world from which Rhys never really escaped, one of prejudice, abuse, and abuse’s shamefaced offspring, complicity.”
Illuminating and meticulously researched…Reveals how her subject’s tumultuous life informed her brilliant art.”
05/06/2022
Jean Rhys is best known as the author of Wide Sargasso Sea, a 1966 prequel of sorts to Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre, in which Rhys used her deep knowledge of Caribbean life and culture to create a backstory for the "madwoman" in the attic, Mr. Rochester's first wife, Bertha. Seymour (Mary Shelley) shares her prodigious research into the writing of Wide Sargasso Sea, along with Rhys's other novels and short stories, as she explores Rhys's eventful and chaotic life. Rhys was born on the Caribbean island of Dominica, where she lived for her first 16 years before moving to England. Failing as an actress, Rhys turned to writing, where she had some success but remained relatively unknown for many years until her works began to be adapted for radio. Beyond her literary career, Rhys's life was also punctuated by heavy drinking, periodic mental breakdowns, many marriages, and heavy reliance on friends and family for financial support. Following a strict chronological approach to Rhys's life, Seymour effectively connects events in Rhys's life with the plots and characters of her novels and short stories. VERDICT A deeply researched and insightful exploration of one of the 20th century's lesser known authors.—Rebecca Mugridge
British actress Diana Quick brings her aristocratic voice and impeccable pacing to this biography of the writer Jean Rhys. Most known for her mesmerizing novel WIDE SARGASSO SEA, Rhys was as extraordinary as the women in her work. Of mixed Welsh, Scots, and Creole descent, she was raised on the Caribbean island of Dominica. After moving to England at age 16, she lived a fascinating independent life—unusual for the time—which included mistress situations, several marriages, children, alcoholism, and poverty. Quick deftly captures Rhys’s Dominican Creole-English when narrating autobiographical passages. Her prodigious dramatic skills are on full display in the many excerpts of dialogue and narrative from Rhys’s novels. Listeners will be inspired to discover (or revisit) the writings of Jean Rhys. J.E.S. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award © AudioFile 2022, Portland, Maine
★ 2022-04-08
A fresh biography of the enigmatic British novelist.
Jean Rhys (1890-1979) was a mysterious, fragmented, complicated literary figure. Piecing together the puzzle of her subject’s life, veteran novelist and biographer Seymour takes readers on a wild and satisfying ride. The author begins with Rhys’ childhood on the Caribbean island of Dominica, where she struggled with the mismatched personalities of her doting father and jealous, abusive mother. Escaping into books, she went on to work as a chorus girl, traveling around England. In 1919, she married a French Dutch journalist and spy, and her subsequent experiences—e.g., economic instability, marital strife, and the devastating loss of her firstborn son—fueled her writing. Influenced by her contemporaries, including Hemingway, Conrad, and Joyce, Rhys was both talented and connected, but her career didn’t take off until later in life. For much of her adult life, Rhys relied on the kindness of relatives and friends, adopting a transient lifestyle that took her from city to city and often thrust her into squalor. Feuds with others involved in the publishing and adaptations of her work coupled with unchecked alcoholism—“my will is quite weakened because I drink too much”—did not serve her well professionally even as her talent gained her a significant following. With one surviving daughter who spent little of her life with her and three marriages in her background, her family life remained rocky at times. At age 50, a breakdown propelled Rhys to take up residence in a rectory to convalesce. She once said, "If I stop writing my life will have been an abject failure. I will not have earned death.” As Seymour clearly shows in this compelling biography, Rhys lived by her credo and continued to write: “Heartbreak, poverty, notoriety, breakdowns and even imprisonment: all became grist to Rhys’s fiction-making mill.”
An elegant work that provides readers with a better understanding of a beloved author's life.
Product Details
| BN ID: | 2940175528702 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Tantor Audio |
| Publication date: | 06/28/2022 |
| Edition description: | Unabridged |
Videos
