Jean Rhys and her witchlike personality

Just as psychological black magic is a major topic in this blog, so are witches, fictional or otherwise, unconscious or otherwise.

Carole Angier's biography Jean Rhys: Life and Work, which is generating a whole string of articles, contains material that suggests that Jean Rhys was witchlike in many ways. This material includes the devastating effect that she had on people close to her and her attitude, behaviour and experiences throughout her life. 

It was interesting to learn that in later years she became completely bent over, like an old witch in a fairytale.

This picture makes her look rather sinister:

A witch for a neighbour
Jean Rhys said herself that her neighbours in Holt in Norfolk called her crazy and a witch, and that her neighbours in the Devon village of Cheriton Fitzpaine also called her a witch. She said that one of these neighbours was a witch herself, and that there was black magic in the village!

The evil witch in action
Carole Angier tells us that in later life Jean Rhys had dreadful moods in which she became sinister, witchlike and cruel. As mentioned in the article about Diana Wynne Jones's evil witch Aunt Maria, in one of these episodes Jean terrified her nurse/assistant by locking the door to prevent escape. Carole Angier uses an interesting expression when recounting this incident:

“Janet had 'never been so frightened', 'she'd never wanted to get out of anywhere more'. As though by black magic, Jean had transferred her own worst feelings of terror and entrapment to another person. She had made someone suffer like her.” 

Jean Rhys, L. M. Montgomery, Jane Eyre and public libraries

Terry Pratchett has said that he owes a great debt to the public libraries that he used as a boy.

Jean Rhys and L. M. Montgomery are two more novelists who were great readers and had access to a public library when young. As girls they read Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre, which made a big impression on them and later influenced their writing.

Jean Rhys and the public library

As mentioned in the article about psychological black magic, Jean Rhys wrote a prequel to Jane Eyre: Wide Sargasso Sea is considered to be her finest work. 

Carole Angier says in her biography Jean Rhys: Life and Work that Jean Rhys was a member of the Hamilton Public Library in the British West Indies island of Dominica as a girl, and this was where she first encountered Jane Eyre. The course of her life might have been very different if she had not read this book at an impressionable age, and Wide Sargasso Sea might never have been written.

Jean Rhys had a lot of trouble with this book, which was probably started around 1945 but not published until 1966.

She said that she went to the local public library in Bude in Cornwall in 1957 to get a copy of Jane Eyre. She wanted to re-read it to refresh her memory of Mr Rochester's mad wife, whose story she was telling in Wide Sargasso Sea.

Jean Rhys, Jane Eyre and psychological black magic

Psychological black magic, the illegitimate use of subtle forces, is an unseen influence of particular interest. This blog is full of examples of and references to it. I have learned what to look out for over the years, and I have recently seen some material in Carole Angier's biography Jean Rhys: Life and Work that suggests to me that psychological black magic was at work in Jean Rhys's life.

This article covers a small coincidence involving names that reminds me of something similar in the life of Charlotte Brontë, with whose work Jean Rhys was very familiar.

First, some basic information.

Jean Rhys and Jane Eyre

Jean Rhys read Jane Eyre as a girl in Dominica. It made such an impression that decades later she wrote a prequel in the form of Wide Sargasso Sea, her most admired and commercially successful novel. 

I suspect that her imagination was particularly stirred when she read that Mr Rochester's wife also came from the British West Indies – Mr Rochester brought Bertha Mason home to England from Jamaica.

I also suspect that Jean Rhys wished that an English gentleman, someone similar to the romantic Mr. Rochester, would do the same for her! He would rescue her; he would take her away from her unsatisfactory life.

She was sent away from Dominica to school in England in 1907, the year of her 17th birthday. She hoped to find a feeling of belonging there. She may also have hoped to meet the English gentleman of her dreams there. As Mr Rochester says to Jane Eyre:

“...the mountain will never be brought to Mahomet, so all you can do is to aid Mahomet to go to the mountain...”