In depicting the long, often tortured life of author Jean Rhys in I USED TO LIVE HERE ONCE, British biographer Miranda Seymour has found metaphor and meaning in the development of a dynamic woman, a feminist and deep thinker who was rarely able to fully enjoy the fruits of her labor.

Rhys was born in 1890 on the small island of Dominica in the Caribbean. Her parents were of Welsh and Scottish descent, making their daughter, Ella Gwendolyn Rees Williams, a white Creole --- that is, someone who would garner no respect either in her birth country or in England, where she immigrated at age 16. Flogged by her emotionally cold mother and subtly sexually abused by her arrogant father, she was fortunate to be sent to England to live with relatives.

"Readers will be grateful that Seymour has brought Jean Rhys back to life with a lively narrative and some fascinating photographs. She undoubtedly will inspire them to read or reread the imaginative creations of her subject."

There, Rhys began to find small comforts in the backstreets of London and elsewhere --- outlandish escapades as a chorus girl and a chance to express her powerful femininity with husbands, lovers and supporters like Ford Madox Ford, who suggested her name change. He recognized not only her talent but also her underlying rage, which she grappled with all her life --- from her early days of rejection and cruel treatment by her family, to her constantly changing love life and the losses and chaos that marriages and affairs continually generated.

For self-satisfaction, and possibly revenge, Rhys projected herself backwards. She presented to her readers the island atmosphere of her youth in her most successful work, WIDE SARGASSO SEA. In it, she daringly dreams a very different scenario for the character of Rochester in Charlotte Brontë’s JANE EYRE. Readers may well see Rochester’s Creole wife as Rhys herself, the hidden “madwoman in the attic.”

Seymour has explored other challenging females in her distinguished writing career, notably Mary Shelley and the wife and daughter of Lord Byron. In this work, she has dusted off and brought to sparkling view even the smallest aspects of Rhys’ bizarre bouts of self-destruction contrasted with her undeniable talent. Rhys struggled with and generally lost herself to alcohol; she employed heavy makeup and wigs to disguise herself as she aged; and her dark side was often on display, with tantrums and her ironically titled, though never completed, autobiography, Smile Please. Her short story, “I Used to Live Here Once,” was an eerie tale whose narrator considers herself to be a ghost, unseen by others, trying to chart a path through the unknown.

Readers will be grateful that Seymour has brought Jean Rhys back to life with a lively narrative and some fascinating photographs. She undoubtedly will inspire them to read or reread the imaginative creations of her subject. Though Rhys often battled darkness, she also was able to declare, “Every day is a new day. Every day you are a new person.”