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.
