Jean Rhys was a pen name, for a woman who thought the only important aspects of a writer are in the work. But her biography is important, precisely because she was often vague about key aspects of it, and therefore knowing her life as accurately as possible gives us valuable insights into how she worked the raw material of experience into fiction.

Gwen Williams 1890–1907

There is first the matter of name, something that reverberates in Rhys's work. She was christened Ella Gwendoline Rees Williams, and later (on the stage or in married life) was known as Ella, Vivien or Emma Grey, Ella Lenglet or Ella Hamer. Gwendolen is the spelling on her tombstone, and the one she used in her autobiography, Smile Please. But she was christened Gwendoline. She hated the name Gwendolen (which she learned means white in Welsh), just as she hated being the palest of her siblings (five in all surviving): they had brown eyes and hair, and she had blue eyes, fair skin and lighter hair (SP:14).

Dominica, where she was born, on August 24, 1890, is still a wildly beautiful island, the heavily forested, mostly undeveloped top of a submerged volcano which still produces the sulfurous “Boiling Lake” in its crater. In her childhood, it was very difficult to get around, and boats were often used to go from one part of the island to another.