Jean Rhys

Born Ella Gwendolen Rees Williams in Roseau, Dominica, in 1890, Jean Rhys moved to England as a teenager. Her early novels, including Quartet (1928) and Good Morning, Midnight (1939), drew on her own experiences of alienation and financial struggle, featuring vulnerable, often expatriate women in Europe. After a long period of obscurity, she published her masterpiece, Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), a postcolonial reimagining of Bertha Mason from Jane Eyre. The novel won the WH Smith Literary Award and secured her legacy as a key modernist and feminist voice. Rhys’s spare, lyrical prose and unflinching exploration of identity, power, and memory continue to influence writers and readers worldwide.