Eleven years after Jean Rhys’s death in 1979, Carole Angier published a monumental biography, a model of its kind, with 70 pages of notes and seven of bibliography. Lilian Pizzichini’s ‘portrait’ of Rhys is a book of a wholly different kind. The best way to describe it is that it bears the same relationship to Angier’s work as Beryl Bainbridge’s novel According to Queeney to Boswell’s Life of Samuel Johnson. Both Pizzichini’s and Bainbridge’s books rely for their potent fascination not on extensive research but, to a remarkable degree, on empathy and imagination.
Pizzichini shows herself at her best when she writes of the 17 years spent by Rhys in her birthplace Dominica, before her parents abruptly decided that she should be despatched to England to be ‘finished’. In skilfully evoking the languorous, lush, steamy island in which, at the age of 12 — Rhys both suffered and enjoyed (the two emotions were all too often disastrously linked for her) sexual abuse at the hands of an elderly family friend, she relies to a large extent on Rhys’s own luminous accounts.
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