Jean Rhys

Rhys was born Ella Gwendolen Rees Williams in Dominica to a Welsh doctor father and a Creole mother, and left for England at sixteen, never quite belonging in either place again. She drifted through chorus lines and modeling work before Ford Madox Ford took her up as a protégé and lover in 1920s Paris, an affair that fed both her fiction and her lasting suspicion of literary men.

Her interwar novels (Quartet, After Leaving Mr Mackenzie, Good Morning, Midnight) won critical notice but little money, and by the 1940s she had vanished so thoroughly into poverty and drink in provincial England that a magazine advertised for her, unsure whether she was still alive. A BBC radio adaptation of Good Morning, Midnight in 1957 drew her back out, and she spent the next decade finishing Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), her celebrated late masterpiece, before dying in Devon in 1979.