JEAN RHYS.

JEAN RHYS. I was pleased to see that Art Garfunkel placed three books by Jean Rhys on his list of 135 favorite books. She is in distinguished company. (Tolstoy is the only writer with more than two if you count REMEMBRANCE OF THINGS PAST as one book). Jean Rhys had a dramatic life. She wrote four very good novels in the twenties and thirties, all rooted in her life experience. They were novels about young women down on their luck and adrift in Europe. AFTER LEAVING MR. MCKENZIE begins with those words, and describes what happens to the heroine after she leaves Mr. McKenzie, the man in Paris who has been keeping her. Jean Rhys had been a chorus girl, the mistress of a rich man, and a member of a menage a trois with the novelist Ford Madox Ford and his wife. Perhaps the most dramatic thing in her life was that Rhys disappeared from public view for almost 25 years until the BBC asked, “Whatever happened to Jean Rhys?” in connection with a dramatization of GOOD MORNING, MIDNIGHT. Rhys then came out of retirement with the triumph of WIDE SARGASSO SEA, which won the prestigious W.H.Smith Literary Award in 1967. Like her earlier books, WIDE SARGASSO SEA is rooted in her life, this time her early life in the Creole community in Domenica.