I Used to Live Here Once – the biography takes its brilliantly apt title from one of Rhys’s ghost stories – is shot through with madness...Half its cast are half crazy, and most of the rest are as creepy as hell...Liars and fraudsters, bigamists and bolters, grifters and gropers: they’re all here, though Seymour has a special line (because her subject attracted them) in the kind of literary stalker whose pulse races furtively at the sight of an old woman with a bad wig, a whisky habit and (just perhaps) a half-finished manuscript in a drawer...Some readers will relish it when Rhys is to be found in Paris, hanging out with notable bohemians...But it’s the second half of the book, in which she is old and 'potty' and half-cut, that is Seymour’s triumph...The narrative has the tension of a thriller as Rhys struggles to finish Wide Sargasso Sea, and once she has been rediscovered, there are the shabby hotels she haunts; the jaunts with Sonia Orwell and Diana Melly; the literary hangers-on who call for tea...Here is the poet Al Alvarez flirting with her, and here is the memoirist David Plante preparing to stitch her up (the portrait of a sodden Rhys in his book Difficult Women is among the most chilling things I’ve ever read).
... illuminating and meticulously researched ... paints a deft portrait of a flawed, complex, yet endlessly fascinating woman who, though repeatedly bowed, refused to be broken ... Following dismal reviews of her fourth novel, Rhys drifted into obscurity. Ms. Seymour’s book could have lost momentum here. Instead, it compellingly charts turbulent, drink-fueled years of wild moods and reckless acts before building to a cathartic climax with Rhys’s rescue, renewed lease on life and late-career triumph ... is at its most powerful when Ms. Seymour, clear-eyed but also with empathy, elaborates on Rhys’s woes ... Ms. Seymour is less convincing with her bold claim that Rhys was 'perhaps the finest English woman novelist of the twentieth century.' However, she does expertly demonstrate that Rhys led a challenging yet remarkable life and that her slim but substantial novels about beleaguered women were ahead of their time ... This insightful biography brilliantly shows how her many battles were lost and won.
The best biographies marry the talents of a perceptive biographer and a complicated subject. In Miranda Seymour's new biography of British writer Jean Rhys, readers will find a perfect match ... a compassionate and unflinching portrait of a renegade of tenacity and talent, for whom writing was the best and only thing. Everything else was a complication.
Seymour’s approach to the celebrated author of novels such as Good Morning, Midnight and Wide Sargasso Sea is rooted in similar clarity, yet underpinned by an acute empathy that drives her into less obvious corners...The result is an exhaustive, definitive ride around both the idea and the reality of Jean Rhys, and what emerges is a portrait of a contrarian woman, with 'the haunted life' that Seymour writes of brought on by tragic and transformative experiences, and Rhys’s own sense of being a ghost haunting her own life...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.
If you removed phrases like 'no clear account exists,' 'we can’t be sure,' 'a curious silence,' 'it’s possible that,' 'complete absence of documentation,' 'appears to,' 'seems likely' and 'questions abound,' Seymour’s biography would shrink by 10 percent. These locutions clutter Seymour’s book, especially since what we do know of Rhys’s life and career is, if not encyclopedic, a good deal ... Seymour is the author of many well-regarded biographies, including those of Mary Shelley, Robert Graves and Lord Byron’s wife and daughter. This one has, somehow, gotten away from her. It’s curiously lackluster ... On the one hand, it’s breezy — the sort of biography in which the author prints a snapshot of herself outside a school Rhys attended, and describes chatting up various locals on her researches ... On the other hand, it’s mean-spirited ... The prose and analysis are soft. Seymour leaves out so many of the best things Rhys wrote and said, and thus makes her seem less intelligent than she was. She lingers over Rhys’s intense interest in her own appearance, even quite late in life, for example, without noting that Rhys wrote that such an interest is 'the real curse of Eve' ... Seymour has some material previous biographers didn’t. But the details in her book are, sentence by sentence and page by page, less piquant than the ones in Angier’s ... Rhys had a uniquely lonely intelligence, and a talent for facing hard truths. If all you know of her is Wide Sargasso Sea, this book will encourage you to branch out. That’s nearly — almost, maybe — worth the price of admission.
... 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.
... intimate and insightful ... Whether Rhys’s heroines were Rhys or not, this certainly reads like novel. Seymour, the author of biographies of Lady Ottoline Morrell and Mary Shelley, is a bewitching writer. Rhys used to talk about the 'magics' practised on Dominica, the Caribbean island on which she was born. This book is full of magics ... Seymour gives us Rhys in all her glory.
... richly detailed, exhaustively researched, and warmly sympathetic ... In exhaustive detail Seymour traces the ways in which Rhys transformed fairly ordinary autobiographical material into fiction ... 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.
I Used To Live Here Once: The Haunted Life of Jean Rhys...takes a more thoughtfully plangent approach to its subject than any previous biographical attempt ... Two things become obvious fairly quickly while reading this ghost story. The first is that Seymour has thoroughly researched every last moment of her subject’s life, never resting on consensus and (wisely) never completely trusting Rhys herself about anything. At every turn, even on comparatively minor matters, Seymour seems to have read everything and weighed it all carefully ... The second very noticeable thing about this book is its most pleasant surprise: the crisp, punchy eloquence of Seymour’s own prose.
Seymour pieces together episodes of Rhys’s biography by way of long comparisons with her stories, an approach that does justice neither to the life nor to the work. She is also frustratingly qualified in her praise for Rhys ... There’s often a tone of condescension in accounts of Jean Rhys. Seymour does her the justice of treating her seriously. She can see the obvious rejoinder to all those people who chuckled about how helpless and hopeless Rhys was. After all, she survived, didn’t she? She defied the kind of misfortunes and blood-alcohol levels that would have floored an ox to live to nearly 90 ... More to the point, she ground a defiant literary response out of it all.
One of the chief aims of Miranda Seymour’s new biography, it seems, is to counter...demeaning and oddly vituperative characterizations. Without bowdlerizing the chaos and murk of Rhys’s life, or attempting to concoct for her a more exemplary character, Seymour makes a convincing case for Rhys’s intelligence and agency as an artist ... 'I never wanted to write, [Rhys] once wrote to a friend ... But, as Seymour successfully demonstrates, this oft-quoted remark was something of a feint. It does little justice, at any rate, to the scrupulous care that Rhys applied to her prose or the perfectionism that made her so unwilling ever to declare her books complete.
British biographer Miranda Seymour has found metaphor and meaning in the development of a dynamic woman ... 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 ... 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.
Seymour 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 ... 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 ... A deeply researched and insightful exploration of one of the 20th century’s lesser known authors.
... detailed and exhaustive ... Seymour details tirelessly the many vicissitudes of Rhys’ personal and literary life ... This book seems essentially targeted toward Rhys’ many fans; it may also spur other readers back to the novels to see for themselves, though there are many long passages of ennui, when the trivial unpleasantness of Rhys’ bad behavior and sense of entitlement make it hard to continue. Some graphic depiction of a timeline of what she wrote, when, and where would have helped newcomers sort through the messier details here, and made this very elegantly produced book rather less of a chore for the unconverted.
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.
Piecing together the puzzle of her subject’s life, veteran novelist and biographer Seymour takes readers on a wild and satisfying ride...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...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.
Critic Seymour 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'...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...This captivating study is well worth a look for fans and scholars.
