A last look at the depressing biography of Jean Rhys

The previous articles in the series inspired by Carole Angier's biography Jean Rhys: Life and Work have covered most of the book's content of particular interest to me and relevance to this blog.

The mining for inspiration has been resulting in diminishing returns. While there is still more material in the book that attracts my attention and inspires commentary, it is mostly more of the same: it enhances topics already covered and supports points already made; it provides further descriptions of Jean Rhys's attributes and deficiencies; it gives yet more depressing and exasperating examples of her infantile personality, lack of life skills, bad behaviour and failure to learn from experience. 

However, there is still a little more to say in the form of a few miscellaneous thoughts and connections before leaving the biography behind at last and moving on to other things.

More elements in common with other writers
The article about Jean Rhys and Antonia White lists many elements that these two novelists had in common; several other articles, including the one about feeling different, mention some more familiar names. 

In addition to all that, Jean Rhys resembles Ouida and several others in her lack of financial sense, common sense and sense of humour. Ouida lost many letters and cherished mementos during her frequent moves from hotel to hotel and villa to villa; it was much the same for Jean Rhys.

Reading about her appalling treatment of her unfortunate and long-suffering husbands and the terrible effect that this had on them reminded me of other writers whose husbands were much the worse for the relationship:  Alison Uttley, Mary Webb, Daphne du Maurier and L. M. Montgomery are some who come immediately to mind. 

Charlotte Brontë and Jane Eyre: some 'coincidences' revisited

The 'coincidence' of Charlotte Brontë's childhood obsession with Arthur Wellesley, Duke of Wellington and the subsequent appearance in her life of Arthur Bell Nichols was first mentioned in an article about being careful what you dwell on and again in an article featuring Jean Rhys.  

Another 'coincidence' in Charlotte Brontë's life that is worth highlighting and was also mentioned earlier is her accident involving a horse that echoes something that happened in Jane Eyre, which was published seven years before the event. 

Other people have noticed these connections. While they may assume that they are just interesting, but not particularly significant, coincidences, I thought at the time that certain unseen influences were at work, and I still think so.

Many years have passed since I first mentioned these two 'coincidences'. Since then, I have come across other examples of such coincidences and accidents. 

Something I recently read in Carole Angier's biography of Jean Rhys inspired me to take another look at the two incidents involving horses in the light of some of the later discoveries and produce an updated and enhanced version of events and my ideas about them.

Jane Eyre and the horse incident
The incident involving Jane Eyre and a horse occurs when she first encounters Mr Rochester. 

On the way to post a letter on a freezing winter's day, she sits on a stile for a while. She hears the sound of approaching hooves, then Mr Rochester comes into view on his black horse. Just as they are passing her, the horse slips on the ice and comes crashing down. Mr Rochester is hurt, so he asks Jane to catch the horse for him. This is not an easy task:

“I...went up to the tall steed; I endeavoured to catch the bridle, but it was a spirited thing, and would not let me come near its head; I made effort on effort, though in vain: meantime, I was mortally afraid of its trampling fore-feet.”

From Jane Eyre

L. M. Montgomery, curses and two suspicious deaths

The article about the novelist Mary Webb contains an account of what happened some years after her death to her husband and his second wife. This is a good example of the 'curse or coincidence?' scenario, which is featured in several other articles.

I was reminded of this case by something that I recently read in a biography of Lucy Maud Montgomery: there are two similar, possibly suspicious, deaths in her life too.

Each case is all the more significant in the light of the other one, and even more so when put into the wider context of suspicious deaths involving other creative people who might have used unseen influences against someone who injured them.

A summary of the Mary Webb affair

Mary Webb's husband Henry became more and more distant from her: she was difficult to live with and he was attached to an attractive young pupil of his.  When Mary Webb died, the sales of her books took off; her husband soon married the ex-pupil and they got all the royalties. Their new life of luxury came to an end when Henry Webb died prematurely after an 'accident' while mountain climbing. His widow remarried, but just like Mary Webb she died of an incurable disease at the age of forty-six.

A summary of the L. M. Montgomery affair

When she was around 23 years old, L. M. Montgomery became infatuated with a very attractive man called Herman Leard. They enjoyed each other's company, but nothing came of it. Her side of the story, which she mentioned in journals written for eventual publication, is that despite being overwhelmed by her feelings for him, she rejected him because he was unworthy of her. She considered him beneath her socially, intellectually and educationally. 

Herman Leard died in 1899, one year after she had last seen him, possibly of complications from influenza. He was almost 29 years old. He had been engaged to a very beautiful young woman who mourned him for some years, married someone else and died 10 years after Leard's death.

Stella Gibbons, white magic and balancing the books

Feelings of depression and of being psychically poisoned are not the only problems faced by suggestible and impressionable readers.

When reading the previously mentioned biographical material, I have often felt exasperated by the subjects’ negativity, melodramatic outbursts and self-indulgent behaviour, lack of common sense and blindness to the cause of some of their problems.

Some writers’ chronic money troubles for example could often have been avoided. As for the messy relationships, why did they get involved with such awful people in the first place? Why did they never learn from experience? Why couldn’t they see that they were their own worst enemies! 

Reading other books just for their uplifting effect is not enough here: something more is needed. So what are the best solutions?

Stella Gibbons’s solution
Stella Gibbons became so exasperated by the doomy and dismal books of Mary Webb and similar writers that she wrote Cold Comfort Farm both as a parody of rural melodramas and a remedy for the plight of the characters. 

She transmuted tragedies into comedies and showed how common sense, determination, good advice and a positive approach could be used to produce solutions for the problems of many miserable and apparently doomed people, transform unsatisfactory lives and bring order out of chaos. 

Re-writing the scenarios to give them a positive outcome as Stella Gibbons did is a good way to break the spell; it can even be a form of white magic. 

Something like this happens in Sheri S. Tepper’s Marianne Trilogy, when an ally who is a white magician replaces a series of sinister gifts sent to Marianne by a black witch with similar but wholesome gifts to reverse the evil effects.

Balancing the books: a problem and a solution

I started an article about Terry Pratchett’s witch Tiffany Aching by saying what a great relief it was for me to turn to his books after reading a lot of depressing biographical material.

This introduced one of the problems that reading certain books can cause together with a good solution.

While other articles cover the sometimes devastating effects of putting ideas and experiences into the context of other people’s lives and looking at the total picture, this one is about being badly affected emotionally or even psychically rather than mentally. 

Reading about the lives of writers such as August Strindberg, Stella Benson, Mary Webb, Ouida, Jean Rhys and Antonia White, who have all been featured or at least mentioned on here, can have a very bad effect on impressionable people.

Some people are very good at getting inside books, sharing the writers’ viewpoints and living the lives and stories.  This can be a two-edged sword: when reading certain books, such people are in danger of getting sucked in, overwhelmed, trapped and poisoned by psychic contagion.

Some of the harmful effects come from picking up the writers’ inner states from the material: general negativity and feelings of misery, agony, abandonment, depression, desolation, disconnection, doom and despair can be infectious. 

Counterweights and antidotes
By far the best solution is to read very different books, ones that have on the whole a very positive effect. They can be inspiring, educational and informational or just entertaining. 

Children’s and young adults’ books are often ideal; old friends, comfort reading and new books by a favourite author are all good too.  

Public libraries present

For much of my life, I took the existence of public libraries for granted: they were just there. I can now look at them more objectively and put my experiences into various contexts.

I now know something about the background and history of public libraries and about other people’s views on and experiences of them.

There was a long discussion about free public libraries on the old Conservative Conserpiracy Forum. Some posters approved of them, others did not. I made several contributions in their favour and challenged some of the points made by the antis.

In addition to my personal memories, those old posts and some information I compiled at the time are the main source of material for the public library articles.

This one will bring my personal experience up to date. 

Leaving the public library behind
After leaving school, I continued to be a great user of local public libraries for some years. Then came a time when I allowed my membership to lapse and even forgot that public libraries existed! Buying books instead of borrowing them became the norm for me.

There were several reasons for my defection:

I had moved to an area where the local library was not at all impressive; it was small and there was a very poor showing on the shelves, with little to make browsing worthwhile.

I became interested in New Age and other types of metaphysical books that my library didn’t stock.

I could afford to buy whatever books I wanted, fiction and non-fiction, new or second-hand as available, and I was spoilt for choice as there were many bookshops of various kinds within easy reach including specialist, second-hand and discount. There were charity shops everywhere and they were a good source of cheap books. Some street market stalls sold books too. Browsing in all these places was enjoyable and very productive.

Mary Webb’s legacy: curse or coincidence?

Stella Gibbons wrote Cold Comfort Farm as an antidote to and comic parody of a certain type of fiction: the rural novel as written by authors such as Mary Webb and Sheila Kaye-Smith. 

I have never been able to see the attraction of what is known as the ‘Loam and Lovechild School of Fiction’ myself  - not even Thomas Hardy’s books have the power to hold my attention – but when I read in an article I found online while researching Stella Gibbons that Stella once expressed her regret to the writer Michael Pick that she had parodied Mary Webb "because she had such an unhappy life", followed by “This was perhaps oversensitive. Webb had, after all, died five years before the publication of Cold Comfort Farm. Her life, though dogged by illness and depression, was by no means without happiness, and her childhood, compared with Stella's, had been idyllic”, I became curious about Mary Webb and decided to investigate further. 

I read the biographies The Flower of Light and Mary Webb, both by Gladys Mary Coles, and the novel Precious Bane, which is generally considered to be Mary Webb’s masterpiece.  

I found some familiar scenarios in Precious Bane; I decided to produce this article after reading about what happened to Mary Webb’s husband after her death.