The Blue Hour: A Life of Jean Rhys

By Lilian Pizzichini

Book Overview

Jean Rhys (1890 1979) is best known for her 1966 novel Wide Sargasso Sea. A prequel to Jane Eyre, Rhys's revolutionary work reimagined the story of Bertha Rochester the misunderstood madwoman in the attic who was driven to insanity by cruelties beyond her control. The Blue Hour performs a similar exhumation of Rhys's life, which was haunted by demons from within and without. Its examination of Rhys s pain and loss charts her desperate journey from the jungles of Dominica to a British boarding school, and then into an adult life scarred by three failed marriages, the deaths of her two children, and her long battle with alcoholism. A mesmerizing evocation of a fragile and brilliant mind, The Blue Hour explores the crucial element that ultimately spared Rhys from the fate of her most famous protagonist: a genius that rescued her, again and again, from the abyss.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0393058034
• ISBN13: 9780393058031
• Release Date: May 2009
• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
• Length: 336 Pages
• Weight: 0.99 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.3" x 5.8" x 8.3"

Customer Reviews

the louche life

jim carroll had written: "twilight is filled only with red taillights moving away to bridges and tunnels" and such was the life of Rhys after the shock of the illusion of love. she kept going despite ..."the mercurial sadness of another darkness descending" (Carroll again, from WHILE SHE'S GONE) and created great literature from her need and from her existential loneliness, and this new biography (though Rhys had put it in her Will that she didn't want any biography to be written - thus one star deducted), is exceptional. I wrote of it, and Rhys, at some length, on Sept. 9th '09, on the fifth part (omoopart5) of my "omoo" blog.

Wonderful Book!!

Hi All, I read this book in two nights because even though it's not a thriller it is just wonderful. L.P., the author has a way with Jean Rhys and with writing directly but so well. I usually know what I want to say about a book I was so immersed in and so recently (I finished it last night). But it's hard to say right now why I found this biography such a page turner. I'll try to say what I loved: The descriptions of Jean at various stages of life, starting in the magical Dominica and then to London, Paris, Vienna, Holland and back to London were told without a spare word. You are there with Jean Rhys. Which leads me to the second wonderful thing about the writer, she does not intrude. She is not pretending to be Jean Rhys but she is giving us Ms. Rhys in all her ever-changing complexity so that when we re-read or read Rhys novels we know where she was and what her mind was focused on that fed her writing. But for a third reason, I find it as yet impossible to describe. Pizzichini just writes so well that there is a mysterious something that makes this book really hard to put down. One the the best biographies I've ever read. Thanks L.P. PS I wrote this review many moons ago. It wasn't put under this book for reasons I don't understand but I wanted to add my voice to the other two.

A Terrific Book & Fascinating Biography!

This is a lively biography of the much troubled writer Jean Rhys who was author of Wide Sargasso Sea which is a prequel to Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte. Rhys lived a fast and furious life and The Blue Hour is terrific reading.

A Troubled Life, But Great Achievements

"The Blue Hour," by Lillian Pizzichini, is a biography of the late, now much admired by feminists, West Indian-born author Jean Rhys. Rhys, who later in her life had fallen into obscurity after her initial novelistic career petered out, published the astonishing novel Wide Sargasso Sea, in 1966. It is a stunningly-imagined prequel of sorts to famous British Victorian novelist Charlotte Bronte's celebrated, also much honored, Jane Eyre; and is now considered one of the great feminist novels of the 20th century. "Sargasso" gives us the backstory of Bertha Mason Rochester, the tragically misunderstood "madwoman in the attic:"Mr. Rochester's attic, that is. Bronte had characterized the first Mrs. Rochester as having originated in the West Indies; Rhys, perhaps the only author who could ever have done so, picked this up and fleshed out a woman, living in the cold gray environment that England can be, driven to insanity by cruelties beyond her control. "Sargasso," upon publication, won its author many awards and honors, but she always said it all came too late for her. In this rather brief book, Pizzichini gives us a sympathetic, tactful biography of Rhys, who was born in Domenica, British West Indies, on August 24, 1890, as Ella Gwendolen Rees Williams, daughter of a Welsh doctor and a white Creole mother of Scottish descent. Of course, as history makes clear to us, and Pizzichini emphasizes, the term "white Creole," for a family that had been in the West Indies for generations, was somewhat misleading. It was always understood that such a family was not necessarily entirely genetically white; and Rhys apparently was harassed on this score as a child: some of her family servants called her a "white cockroach." At any rate, the author tells us that Rhys was not able to establish close relationships with either her repressed, Victorian-era mother or father as a child. Rhys left her lushly beautiful, but environmentally hostile, island home for England in 1907, and returned only briefly afterward. She moved in expatriate Bohemian circles in London, Paris, and Vienna in the 1920s and `30s, becoming acquainted with James Joyce and Ernest Hemingway, among others. She had a blazing affair with the outstanding novelist Ford Maddox Ford, and some sort of relationship with his wife, as well, that she was to treat in a novel, Quartet (Norton Paperback Fiction). Rhys wrote five books before disappearing from sight: upon the publication of "Sargasso," her former publisher was surprised to learn that she was still alive. She was married three times, lived through two world wars, and lost her first-born son. She was a pretty young woman, and, after a mediocre show business career, seems to have turned to concubinage, and/or prostitution, as she was in near-continuous financial trouble. There is no question that she was somewhat crippled by her inner demons: she was a serious alcoholic. She was disruptive, too, (as an older woman she was convicted