The article about Carole Angier's doubly-depressing biography of the novelist Jean Rhys includes an attempt to answer a big question the book raises: if it has such a bad effect, why read it and why comment on it?
I said something relevant to this question a long time ago in the first article about Diana Wynne Jones's witch Aunt Maria: I persevere with some infuriating and/or depressing books because there are lessons to be learned and points and connections to be made from them.
This article attempts to answer a small question that arose recently when I noticed a few similarities between Jean Rhys as described in Carole Angier's biography and the fictional Aunt Maria: could Diana Wynne Jones have been influenced by Jean Rhys: Life and Work when she was writing Black Maria aka Aunt Maria?
After dealing with some of the more significant topics connected with Jean Rhys, I decided to investigate the possibility that Diana Wynne Jones had read Carole Angier's biography and, consciously or unconsciously, copied a little of the material for her children's book.
I started by re-reading Black Maria in the light of what I had recently learned about Jean Rhys; some of the common elements I found this time around seemed worth highlighting - and more than just coincidence.
Both Jean Rhys and Aunt Maria pretended to be more disabled than they really were.
The first article about Aunt Maria mentions a scene in which the horrible old witch, who is supposedly can barely walk and spends much of her time in a wheelchair, is quite able to get up and go to the window when she sees something that angers her.
When I first read this, I was immediately reminded of something I had read many years earlier about Jean Rhys while looking into the Jane Eyre connection: when she became angry with her assistant, she left her wheelchair in a flash to run to the door and lock it.
I knew very little about Jean Rhys at the time and mentioned her in the Aunt Maria article only as a matter of minor interest. I assumed that the wheelchairs were just a coincidence and that Diana Wynne Jones was independently describing a particular selfish, devious, emotional blackmailing and exploitative personality type.
That was then. Now that I have recently assimilated a lot more information about Jean Rhys, the chilling wheelchair incident seems more significant; I referred to it in the article about her witchlike personality.
Both Aunt Maria and Jean Rhys were - or wanted people to believe that they were - helpless on their own.
Aunt Maria gets everything done for her: the family she invites to stay with her 'for a break' soon find themselves cooking, cleaning, shopping, washing dishes, gardening, tending to and waiting on her and helping her to wash and dress.
The mother of the young girl Mig who narrates the story says this of Aunt Maria and her circle of subordinate witches:
“She’s a large golden furry insect. A Queen Bee...It amuses me the way they all run round her and make sure she’s happy, just as if they were Workers and she were their Queen...”
When describing the last years of Jean Rhys's life, Carole Angier tells us that a large retinue of assistants, personal carers and many other supporters “buzzed around to serve her, like a queen bee.”
The army of helpers took on the domestic and administrative tasks so that Jean Rhys had nothing to do but write. Shopping, cooking, cleaning, the laundry and the gardening were all done for her, as were the typing, posting and filing.
Aunt Maria was controlling while Jean Rhys was helpless in an infantile way, but the descriptions of the services they received are uncannily similar.
They were both selfish tyrants. They both wore people who waited on them hand and foot to a frazzle with their demands.
Aunt Maria took it for granted that Mig and her mother would give up everything, home, school and job for example, move permanently to her house and dedicate themselves to her service.
Carole Angier tells us that Jean Rhys too expected people to rearrange their whole lives for her benefit; some 'hosts' relinquished their bedroom and bathroom to her for example.
Both the married witches in Black Maria and Jean Rhys had a terrible effect on their husbands.
The married men of the town, which Aunt Maria reigns over like a queen bee, are mindless zombies, pale and drained de-souled automata in business suits whose only use is to earn money for the women.
Jean Rhys saw her husbands as people who existed just to make money for her, and the unconscious pressure she exerted had a very bad effect on them. They devolved in every way under her malign influence, and just like the husbands in Black Maria lost all sense of reality.
After noticing these common elements, I was fairly sure that Diana Wynne Jones was influenced by what she had read about Jean Rhys.
I checked the publication dates and found that Carole Angier's biography was first published in November 1990 and Black Maria in May 1991, so there could in theory have been a short window of opportunity for Diana Wynne Jones to read the biography and produce her book.
I then discovered from her book Reflections that Diana Wynne Jones had written Black Maria before 1988 but suppressed publication for some years because she felt that it was too frightening, which means that she could not have been influenced by Carole Angier's biography.
I then remembered that Carole Angier had written an earlier – and much shorter - biography of Jean Rhys that was published in 1985; I thought that perhaps Diana Wynne Jones had read this one and got some material from it.
I investigated the little book Jean Rhys (Lives of modern women) and found no reference to queen bees and no mention of the wheelchair incident.
It is possible that although the bulk of Black Maria was written several years before Jean Rhys: Life and Work was published, Diana Wynne Jones topped up her book by adding a few last-minute scenes after reading this biography. Possible, but, as I now think, not very likely.
I have returned to the view that the similarities are just a coincidence. While I am as sure as I can be that Stella Gibbons's My American was inspired by J. P. Priestley's Angel Pavement and John Christopher's Guardians by Robert A. Heinlein's Citizen of the Galaxy, I now believe that Diana Wynne Jones created Aunt Maria without ever having read anything about Jean Rhys.
After all, there are many examples on here of people who quite independently had similar experiences and said and did much the same things. Some of the similarities are uncanny - this article about May Sinclair and L. M. Montgomery etc. has some good examples - but certain personality types with their associated programs and scenarios do seem to crop up here and there from time to time.
Diana Wynne Jones tells us in Reflections that Aunt Maria was based on someone she knew and that her editor met five women exactly like her soon after reading the book!
Jean Rhys and Diana Wynne Jones were very different people, but there is a slight likeness in some pictures of them. Jean Rhys is in the pink pullover here:
