The Blue Hour: A Life of Jean Rhys [Hardcover]

Lilian Pizzichini (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 26, 2009

A groundbreaking biography of a psychologically traumatized novelist who forever changed the way we look at women in fiction.

Jean Rhys (1890–1979) is best known for her 1966 novel Wide Sargasso Sea. A prequel to Jane Eyre, Rhys’s revolutionary work reimagined the story of Bertha Rochester—the misunderstood “madwoman in the attic” who was driven to insanity by cruelties beyond her control. The Blue Hour performs a similar exhumation of Rhys’s life, which was haunted by demons from within and without. Its examination of Rhys’s pain and loss charts her desperate journey from the jungles of Dominica to a British boarding school, and then into an adult life scarred by three failed marriages, the deaths of her two children, and her long battle with alcoholism.

A mesmerizing evocation of a fragile and brilliant mind, The Blue Hour explores the crucial element that ultimately spared Rhys from the fate of her most famous protagonist: a genius that rescued her, again and again, from the abyss.

20 photos

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

The genius of novelist Jean Rhys (1890–1979) is painfully depicted in this compelling short biography, exploring what it was like to live such a tortured life. Rhys was overlooked for decades until Wide Sargasso Sea, her postmodern shift of emphasis on Jane Eyre, became an instant sensation in 1966. Three times married to ne'er-do-wells and enduring an unhappy dollop of motherhood, Rhys was better known as the lover of Ford Maddox Ford. According to British author Pizzichini (Dead Man's Wages), both Ford's predatory paternalism and his novelist's flattery attracted and repelled her, as did the criminal element of society. Pizzichini searches Rhys's background for clues to her self-destructive judgments. Born in Dominica as Ella Gwendolen Rees Williams, she was later a free-spirited young outsider in starchy, empirical England and elsewhere in Europe. Stuck with men who couldn't make ends meet, Rhys had a brief career in prostitution and also worked as a chorus girl. Evocative and empathetic, Pizzichini still offers no fully satisfactory explanation for the explosiveness of Rhys's interior life: She found life difficult because she found it hard to be herself. 20 photos. (Apr. 29)
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From Booklist

*Starred Review* The pain expressed in Rhys’ sexually frank, devastating fiction is so authentic, it suggests firsthand experience of the bleakest aspects of womanhood in a misogynist society. Ahead of her time and forever dispossessed, deeply unconventional and intensely creative, Rhys, born Ella Gwendoline Rees Williams in sunny Dominica in 1890 and sent to boarding school in chilly England, did, indeed, draw on her own life in such indelible works as Good Morning, Midnight (1939) and Wide Sargasso Sea (1966). Her harrowing story has been told in full by Carole Angier in a 1990 biography. What Pizzichini—who wrote about her grandfather,  a notorious London gangster, in Dead Man’s Wages (2002)—achieves in this page-turner is a piercingly empathic psychological portrait. Beginning in the West Indies, where Rhys “spent much of her childhood screaming,” up to her death in 1979, Pizzichini decodes the volatile chemistry of Rhys’ watchfulness and tenacity, hatred of hypocrisy and attraction to criminality, and addictions to conflict and alcohol. As Pizzichini perceptively tracks Rhys the chorus girl, kept woman, wife of three feckless crooks, lover of Ford Maddox Ford, and survivor of breakdowns and incarceration, a world-altering writer of ruthless honesty emerges from the flames. --Donna Seaman

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 336 pages
• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company; First Edition first Printing edition (May 26, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0393058034
• ISBN-13: 978-0393058031
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.8 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 10.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #327,595 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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20 of 22 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Troubled Life, But Great Achievements, May 13, 2009

By 

Stephanie DePue (Carolina Beach, NC USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Blue Hour: A Life of Jean Rhys (Hardcover)

"The Blue Hour," by Lillian Pizzichini, is a biography of the late, now much admired by feminists, West Indian-born author Jean Rhys. Rhys, who later in her life had fallen into obscurity after her initial novelistic career petered out, published the astonishing novel Wide Sargasso Sea, in 1966. It is a stunningly-imagined prequel of sorts to famous British Victorian novelist Charlotte Bronte's celebrated, also much honored, Jane Eyre; and is now considered one of the great feminist novels of the 20th century. "Sargasso" gives us the backstory of Bertha Mason Rochester, the tragically misunderstood "madwoman in the attic:"Mr. Rochester's attic, that is. Bronte had characterized the first Mrs. Rochester as having originated in the West Indies; Rhys, perhaps the only author who could ever have done so, picked this up and fleshed out a woman, living in the cold gray environment that England can be, driven to insanity by cruelties beyond her control. "Sargasso," upon publication, won its author many awards and honors, but she always said it all came too late for her.

In this rather brief book, Pizzichini gives us a sympathetic, tactful biography of Rhys, who was born in Domenica, British West Indies, on August 24, 1890, as Ella Gwendolen Rees Williams, daughter of a Welsh doctor and a white Creole mother of Scottish descent. Of course, as history makes clear to us, and Pizzichini emphasizes, the term "white Creole," for a family that had been in the West Indies for generations, was somewhat misleading. It was always understood that such a family was not necessarily entirely genetically white; and Rhys apparently was harassed on this score as a child: some of her family servants called her a "white cockroach." At any rate, the author tells us that Rhys was not able to establish close relationships with either her repressed, Victorian-era mother or father as a child.

Rhys left her lushly beautiful, but environmentally hostile, island home for England in 1907, and returned only briefly afterward. She moved in expatriate Bohemian circles in London, Paris, and Vienna in the 1920s and `30s, becoming acquainted with James Joyce and Ernest Hemingway, among others. She had a blazing affair with the outstanding novelist Ford Maddox Ford, and some sort of relationship with his wife, as well, that she was to treat in a novel, Quartet (Norton Paperback Fiction). Rhys wrote five books before disappearing from sight: upon the publication of "Sargasso," her former publisher was surprised to learn that she was still alive. She was married three times, lived through two world wars, and lost her first-born son. She was a pretty young woman, and, after a mediocre show business career, seems to have turned to concubinage, and/or prostitution, as she was in near-continuous financial trouble. There is no question that she was somewhat crippled by her inner demons: she was a serious alcoholic. She was disruptive, too, (as an older woman she was convicted several times of drunk and disorderly behavior and/or breach of the peace, actually served some time in Holloway, the famous woman's prison), and was not easy to like, or to help.

Pizzichini does not touch on this, but I have read elsewhere that somewhat later in her life, Rhys seems to have had a relationship with the Englishman George Melly, an omnisexual jazzman/journalist/author; she wrote a song about him with John Chilton, his band leader/arranger. Pizzichini does tell us that Melly's wife Diana Melly was one of the many people who tried to help Rhys, but was forced to give up by the difficulties Rhys presented, and that in company with the Mellys, Rhys appears to have become a regular visitor to Ronnie Scott's, a celebrated London jazz club. (During and after the years of my English exile, I was somewhat acquainted with Mr. Melly; I've a few of his autographed books on my shelves. And I moved in musical circles that took me to Ronnie Scott's a few times myself. It does give me somewhat of an understanding of the circles Rhys frequented, I believe, and they would have been sympathetic to a troubled soul.)

And just what is the blue hour? Explains Pizzichini, an Englishwoman who has written for the "Literary Review," and "The Times Literary Supplement:" "In the summer of 1912 the French parfumier Jacques Guerlain concocted a scent from musk and rose de Bulgarie with a single note of jasmine. He intended his new scent, which he called L'Heure Bleue [The Blue Hour] to evoke dusk in the city. The blue hour is the time when heliotropes and irises in Parisian window boxes are bathed in a blue light and [a] well-groomed Parisienne prepares for the evening." "L'Heure Bleue" was Jean Rhys's favorite perfume; she mentions it in her writing, as she also describes the Caribbean dusk as the blue hour.

If "Wide Sargasso Sea" means something to you, you might want to know more about its author.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Wonderful Book!!, August 30, 2009

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readernyc "readernyc" (New York City, NY USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: The Blue Hour: A Life of Jean Rhys (Hardcover)

Hi All, I read this book in two nights because even though it's not a thriller it is just wonderful. L.P., the author has a way with Jean Rhys and with writing directly but so well.

I usually know what I want to say about a book I was so immersed in and so recently (I finished it last night). But it's hard to say right now why I found this biography such a page turner.

I'll try to say what I loved: The descriptions of Jean at various stages of life, starting in the magical Dominica and then to London, Paris, Vienna, Holland and back to London were told without a spare word. You are there with Jean Rhys. Which leads me to the second wonderful thing about the writer, she does not intrude. She is not pretending to be Jean Rhys but she is giving us Ms. Rhys in all her ever-changing complexity so that when we re-read or read Rhys novels we know where she was and what her mind was focused on that fed her writing.

But for a third reason, I find it as yet impossible to describe. Pizzichini just writes so well that there is a mysterious something that makes this book really hard to put down. One the the best biographies I've ever read. Thanks L.P.

PS I wrote this review many moons ago. It wasn't put under this book for reasons I don't understand but I wanted to add my voice to the other two.

2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Terrific Book & Fascinating Biography!, July 9, 2009

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BookManBookWoman TV REVIEWS "Saralee Terry Woods" (Nashville, Tn United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Blue Hour: A Life of Jean Rhys (Hardcover)

This is a lively biography of the much troubled writer Jean Rhys who was author of Wide Sargasso Sea which is a prequel to Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte. Rhys lived a fast and furious life and The Blue Hour is terrific reading.