RaveThe Financial Times (UK)... 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, while never losing sight of Rhys’s literary achievements ... Those personal circumstances, however, continue to fascinate and Seymour gives them full attention ... Seymour has read widely, triangulating Rhys’s own accounts, fiction and non-fiction with the profiles, memoirs, autobiographical fiction and letters of others. She has also expended reportorial shoe leather (her descriptions of Dominica’s natural beauty and melancholy history might cause a surge in tourism to the island) ... Her prose style, understated yet knowing, would, one can’t help thinking, earn the approval of her exacting subject. One disappointment: the accompanying photographs, printed within the text on matt paper, don’t do justice to the book ... Seymour is clearly a Rhys aficionada, albeit a subtle one, fully cognisant of the failings of the woman. Pace Alvarez, 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.
