JEAN RHYS: THE ENDLESS VOYAGE

Much has been written about how impending death releases an artist's greatest inner capacities in one final flood that pulls the entire tapestry of their life together.

I can think of few writers for whom this is more true than Jean Rhys. She began in her twenties and attracted acclaimin a narrow but significant literary circle with her natural sense of form and determination to write from the point of view of the underclassed, the disadvantaged with a natural sense of form. Some championed her as the grittier social realism that lay beneath the upper crust world of Virginia Woolf. Voyage in the Dark immediately intrigued Ford Maddox Ford's for its utter lack of sentimentality. This is my favorite Rhys novel, showcasing her uncanny ability to capture the inner derangement of Anna Morgan, a poor chorus girl sent away from her native land, who withers in the bitter cold of England. The novel ends with a startling evocation of the inner mentation of a psychotic episode while the protagnoist undergoes a back room abortion.

Subsequently Rhys' career did not take her into the limelight. She was marginalized, she wrote "about women", she was thin compared with the male writers of the period, she lacked the sheer brilliance of Proust or the innovations of Joyce. She was merely a "good writer" in a time of ground breaking genius.

Personally wrestled with alcoholism, difficult marriages, and the struggle to find a balance between her creativity and her demons as she slipped further into obscurity. Then towards the end of her life, confronting her mortality, she produced "THe Wide Sargasso Sea" -- which not only re-launched her career but brought her to a different level of literary acclaim.

Finally Rhys was serious fiction. Finally, by inhabiting the tormented mind of the mad woman locked in Jane Eyre's symbolic attack and giving her flesh and blood, Rhys had arguably entered the pantheon of the elite few who had pushed their writing beyond the form of entertainment into a powerful art form that began to use a shocking change of perspective -- the ability to tell what seems a narrative which is by definition forbidden - the story of someone insane -- with impressive lucidity, and above all a compassion which drives powerfully to wrestle with what sanity is and how language can press at the outer reaches of consciousness. My suspicion is that as time moves us further into the 20th century the interest in her work will continue to grow and for good reason. Her writing continues to chill, to fascinate, and to remind us all of the power of words to both haunt as well as redeem.