On the eve of the 25th anniversary of her death, Rhys’s work is ripe for reassessment. Her contemporaries were uneasy about her morally ambiguous, fractured characters and the seedy world she dwelt in, as well as wrote about. After her parents sent her from their home in the West Indies to England in 1907, she slipped into a career as a chorus girl, married a Dutch con man in 1919 and headed for Paris, where she became a protege of the English novelist Ford Madox Ford. Today, argues Ruth Webb, author of a new biography of Rhys due out next year, her world would be much more acceptable. “Rhys writes about failures, people who would have been perceived as not part of the mainstream,” she says. “[Her increasing popularity] has to do with a tremendous loosening up in our way of seeing people now. We’re much more open to what would have been considered a demimonde before.”
The intertwined voices of three women dominate the set of “After Mrs Rochester,” which is as spare as Rhys’s prose. Bertha (Sarah Ball) crawls around the floor, tearing at her hair and weeping. The mature Jean Rhys (Diana Quick) provides laconic commentary on her turbulent past. The audience also sees Rhys as a young girl growing up in Dominica–pretty and carefree, but already beginning to realize that she belongs nowhere. That sense of homelessness is at the root of Bertha’s bouts of insanity, as well as Rhys’s own mental instability. Throughout her life she was plagued by periods of depression and violent rages; in 1949 she was sent to Holloway prison for assaulting her neighbors. Teale put together “After Mrs Rochester” from Rhys’s letters and the hints about her life dropped throughout her fiction. “We’re pretty sure Jean read ‘Jane Eyre’ when she was a child, and it must have been quite powerful for her to discover a character who originated in the West Indies and was a white Creole like her,” says Teale. “It took her a lifetime to realize she needed to tell Bertha’s story from the inside.”
Rhys’s recurring themes–the alienation felt by immigrants, their daily humiliations and pervasive melancholy–were unusual in British literature at the turn of the 20th century, when the inhabitants of former colonies were still considered culturally inferior. Now they touch an increasingly large audience. Today those displaced from one culture to another are known to suffer disproportionately high instances of mental illness. Women like the young Jean Rhys–living far from family, eking out a precarious existence, courted by a stream of unreliable sugar daddies–may have existed on the fringes of 1930s Paris, but today they’re everywhere. “The image of a romantic young woman finding a future for herself and the right man doesn’t wash so much now,” says Webb. “You turn out not to be successful, he turns out not to be the right man. That strikes a chord.”
The play is driven by the ceaseless, disquieting tension Rhys lived with, forever an exile struggling to gain acceptance in an alien culture. Halfway through her life she was assumed to be dead, after the BBC–wanting to make a radio play out of one of her novels–tried to track her down and found she had vanished from the literary radar screen. She lived, belligerent and frequently drunk, in London, where she appeared in court nine times over two years on charges of harassment and public disorder. The parallels between the wild, unsettled lives of Rhys and Bertha Rochester extended to their deaths, “both in the remote British countryside, one literally locked up, the other in self-imposed exile,” says Teale. Immigrant life left her, Rhys wrote, feeling like “a kind of ghost.” In this fierce drama, the echoes of Rhys’s desolate existence are brought hauntingly, indelibly, back to life.
