Jean Rhys: feeling different and not belonging

Carole Angier's biography of the novelist Jean Rhys contains some very insightful remarks about her and her life. Some of these remarks are very similar to what I would have come up with myself if I had looked at the same source material. 

The miraculous deliverances and spiralling down elements of Jean Rhys's life have been introduced. This article covers some more key features: she felt different from most people and she felt that she didn't belong anywhere. 

Feeling different 

There is nothing unusual about Jean Rhys's feeling of being fundamentally different from the people around her; after reading biographies of other writers, I would think it very unusual if she didn't feel like that! It's what they all say; it goes with the territory. 

What does seem strange to me is how various people of interest quite independently describe their feelings and experiences in much the same words. 

Something that Carole Angier says about Jean Rhys could equally apply to many others, including Stella Benson and Antonia White:

“One of the strongest feelings Jean had always...was that she didn't fit in the world, that life was a game she had never learned how to play...She did not understand the rules.”

This is exactly how some people feel: everyone knows the rules of the game but them; everyone else knows how to behave, what to say, where to go and what to do, but they are baffled and clueless.

Such people may see the world as a club to which they will never belong no matter how much they want to and how hard they try. The article about Jean Rhys and Antonia White contains uncannily similar quotations about how something always goes wrong when they try to be like other people.

The two worlds of L. M. Montgomery

Canadian author Lucy Maud Montgomery, best known for her Anne of Green Gables series, has recently become a person of interest.

She will eventually be the subject of a longer article. In the meantime, here are two quotations from her that describe the two worlds that some people live in. It was these quotations that made me decide to investigate L. M. Montgomery, her life and her works: 

“I grew up out of that strange, dreamy childhood of mine and went into the world of reality. I met with experiences that bruised my spirit - but they never harmed my ideal world. That was always mine to retreat into at will. I learned that that world and the real world clashed hopelessly and irreconcilably; and I learned to keep them apart so that the former might remain for me unspoiled.

I learned to meet other people on their own ground since there seemed to be no meeting place on mine. I learned to hide the thoughts and dreams and fancies that had no place in the strife and clash of the market place.

I found that it was useless to look for kindred souls in the multitude; one might stumble on such here and there, but as a rule it seemed to me that the majority of people lived for the things of time and sense alone and could not understand my other life. So I piped and danced to other people's piping - and held fast to my own soul as best I could.” 

From My Dear Mr. M: Letters to G.B. Macmillan from L.M. Montgomery

So she too was faced with an unaccommodating, often incomprehensible and sometimes unbearable real world, and she too was able to escape to the inner world of the imagination.

Nicholas Stuart Gray’s witch: Barbara

Barbara is the main character in The Stranger, a short story in Nicolas Stuart Gray’s book The Edge of Evening. She does not at all resemble the witch Huddle, who also appears in this book. She is described as being neither young nor old, neither ugly nor pretty. She has brown hair and violet eyes, and is slim and rather tall. 

Barbara has little in common with other witches I have written about. For example, she is not seeking some black magic book, magical artefact or other item as are Lucy M. Boston's Dr. Melanie Powers, Robin Jarvis's 'nasty piece of work' Rowena Cooper and Linwood Sleigh's‘horrid old lady’ Miss Heckatty; she is not power crazy nor planning to rule the world like Diana Wynne Jones's  Gwendolen Chant; she is not cruel and evil like Sheri S. Tepper's Madame Delubovoska, nor is she surly and unpleasant like Joan Aiken's Mrs Lubbage.

Her problem is that she is miserable; she is a stranger in a strange land; she hates her life in a world where kindness is dreadfully lacking and wants to get away from it. She is tired of people telling her to pull herself together. 

She has learned magic and sorcery just to obtain the power to find a world of her own, a place that is right for her, somewhere with people who speak her language, somewhere she can meet her own kind and be happy at last. She is so desperate for help that she performs a summoning ritual and conjures up a demon – whose name is Balbarith – and orders him to obey her. She commands him to show her other worlds and how to enter them.

Compelled to obedience by the power of Barbara’s spells, Balbarith shows her a few worlds, none of which is suitable. He then finds a fairly reasonable sort of place, simple and happy looking. It is full of flowers, fields and sweet, friendly animals and birds. Barbara likes it very much.