1

Wellspring (1890–1907)

“You turn to the left and the sea is at your back, and the road goes zigzag upwards . . . Everything is green, everywhere things are growing . . . That’s how the road to Constance is—green, and the smell of green, and then the smell of water and dark earth and rotting leaves and damp.”

—Jean Rhys, Voyage in the Dark, Part Three (1934)

NEAR TO THE end of her long life—she was almost ninety when she died in May 1979—Jean Rhys wrote what her Devonshire neighbour William Trevor praised as one of the finest short ghost stories he’d ever read. She called it “I Used to Live Here Once.” The dreaming narrator—evidently Rhys herself—follows the trail of stepping stones that guide her across a shallow, familiar river and onto a rough forest path that leads to her own childhood home. She feels “extraordinarily happy.” But when she walks across the parched grass to where a boy and girl seem to await her, they register her presence and timid greeting only as a sudden chill in the afternoon air. The children turn away. The story ends abruptly: “It was then that I knew.”

Rhys lived in a secluded village in the south-west of England for the last nineteen years of an extraordinary and often reckless life, one that took her from poverty, imprisonment and obscurity to eventual recognition as perhaps the finest English woman novelist of the twentieth century. The island which haunted her mind and almost everything that she wrote lay on the far side of the world. There—not in Devon, or London, nor even in Paris—lay the wellspring of Rhys’s art.

JEAN RHYS WAS born on 24 August 1890 in Dominica, a small and sternly beautiful Caribbean island of green mountains (mornes), tangled forests, rushing rivers, forest pools and impenetrable ravines. Dominica’s larger neighbours—Martinique and the archipelago that forms Guadeloupe—were French, as Dominica itself had been until the island was ceded to the British in 1763, at the end of the Seven Years’ War. By the close of the nineteenth century, when Dominica had almost 29,000 inhabitants, the island’s white population had shrunk to fewer than a hundred. Living in an impoverished outpost of the British Empire, white Dominicans clung to a romanticised vision of England as the centre of their own diminished world, marooned on an island that still spoke in the French-based creole language known today as Kwéyòl.

Jean Rhys’s father, William Rees Williams, was a Welshman with an Irish mother. A ship’s doctor, he came to Dominica in 1881 in search of better pay as a twenty-seven-year-old British-funded medical officer. He went ashore at the tiny coastal village of Stowe in the area known as Grand Bay, lying below the once prosperous plantation of Geneva in the south-east of the island. In January 1882, the Welshman married Minna Lockhart, a white Creole, a term which, despite its pejorative sound, meant only that Minna, whose family still inhabited Mitcham, the old Geneva estate house, had been born on Dominica. The newlywed couple spent their honeymoon year at Stowe. Dr. Rees Williams brightened the sitting-room walls of their little shoreside home with the four prints of Betws-y-Coed in Snowdonia that had adorned his shipboard cabin. In 1885, Williams was promoted from a relatively humble job in the island’s Southern Medical District to a more lucrative position in the capital town of Roseau, where private patient care usefully augmented his income. Here, after renting a house near to the Roseau river on Hillsborough Street (where Jean Rhys was born), the doctor purchased a more substantial property closer to the centre of town.

The Lockhart twins. Rhys’s proud mother Minna.

Her unmarried, more cultured twin sister, Brenda (“Auntie B”) grew up at Geneva, formerly a slave-owning sugar estate, on the Caribbean island of Dominica. (McFarlin)

It was burly, hazel-eyed Willie Rees Williams who named the couple’s fourth child Ella Gwendoline. Gwen, as she was always known to her relatives, followed two older brothers, Edward and Owen, and a sister named Minna, like their mother. A fifth child, a girl, died as an infant, three years before the birth in 1895 of Brenda Clarice, named both for Minna Lockhart’s adored twin (Brenda) and the doctor’s devoted sister (Clarice Rees Williams).^*

Pale-skinned, sapphire-eyed and exceptionally sensitive in spirit, Gwen resembled neither of her parents, nor her more heavily built and dark-haired siblings. Almost from birth, as Rhys remembered it in Smile Please (a memoir which still remained unfinished when she died), she had felt like an outsider; a changeling; a ghostly revenant in the hard light of day. True or not, that was the role which would come to fit both the writer and her work as closely as a handstitched glove.

NO FAMILY PAPERS survive against which to test the accuracy of Smile Please, Jean Rhys’s published account of the seventeen years she spent in the West Indies. An unpublished novel by her brother Owen related the story of a white Creole girl who breaks her family’s unspoken social code by falling in love with an island boy. But it was Owen—not his sister—who was sent away from Dominica for forming intimate relationships with local girls (one was an employee in his parents’ home), an infringement that embarrassed his strait-laced mother. Nothing in Rhys’s own recollections suggests that any such romance took place in her early life, although Antoinette Cosway in Wide Sargasso Sea recalls having exchanged a final “life and death kiss” with her handsome illegitimate cousin Alexander (“Sandi”) before she travels to England as Rochester’s wife.¹ Hearsay in the family of Rhys’s father’s medical colleague Sir Henry Nicholls suggested that Gwen had been labelled “fast” as a young girl. Nicholls and his wife were probably recalling Gwen’s childish crush on their son Willie, a youth whose wild ways would eventually lead to his discreet banishment to Scotland, to study medicine.²

Travel writers and historians (among them the lushly romantic Lafcadio Hearn and earnest James Froude) have provided magnificent descriptions of Dominica’s invincible appearance: a small island rearing up from a range of submerged volcanic peaks like an emerald cathedral of soaring rock. A voracious reader throughout her life, Rhys became familiar with the books written by Froude and Hearn. (Froude toured the island with one of Gwen’s Lockhart uncles in the 1880s, as an unofficial representative of Britain’s Colonial Office; Hearn, visiting the West Indies for two years just before Rhys was born, first wrote about Dominica with a lyricism that artfully concealed the fact that he was describing its forested heights from aboard a passenger ship.)

But Jean would remember Dominica best from her own early experiences. She had seen the gigantic wheel and iron mangles at Geneva’s disused sugar mill (one of sixty mills on the island from which a cluster of white planters had once prospered); she had listened to the family stories told about her own mother’s Lockhart forebears, once the wealthiest of a small plantocracy. The island held a more powerful grasp on her imagination through the enduring presence in her mind of an unforgettable landscape: the green and densely mantled mountains that Rhys knew from childhood as Morne Micotrin, Morne Anglais, Morne Trois Pitons and—towering above them all—Morne Diablotin. They offered a majestic presence, along with a rich stew of gossip, island stories and family scandals that would nourish Jean Rhys’s fiction.

Questions abound. How much of the material on which Rhys seems to draw for her novels was based on historical fact? Should a reader believe in the actual existence of Maillotte Boyd, simply because Anna Morgan, the dream-laden protagonist of Rhys’s third novel (Voyage in the Dark), remembers having seen Maillotte’s name on an old list of house-slaves? Does a real Maillotte gain credibility because Rhys also made use of her unusual name in Wide Sargasso Sea? (There, in Rhys’s extraordinary prequel to Jane Eyre, Maillotte’s daughter appears both as the twin spirit and the nemesis of unhappy Antoinette Cosway, Mr. Rochester’s young Creole wife.) More likely, Rhys was playing with a name that chimes with the word “mulatto,” a term still in use on Dominica today. Mixed race was not uncommon in families like hers. James Potter Lockhart, Minna’s grandfather, had taken two of his slaves as mistresses. Gwen, from an early age, was discouraged from making friends with any of the darker-skinned Lockhart cousins on the island, cousins whose fortunes began slowly ascending as those of her poorer white relatives fell.

RHYS’S FIRST MEMORIES were of the freehold house in Dominica’s capital, Roseau, that her father, a proud Welshman, named Bod Gwilym (“William’s Home”). A large timber-framed corner house, standing between Cork Street and Grandby Street, Bod Gwilym was painted white, with green-shuttered windows. Gwen’s bedroom gave onto a high platform, hidden from public view. From here, as a secret observer, she watched the village women striding down to the marketplace near the bay, dark heads crowned by their bright baskets of mangoes, yellow passionfruit and small, green oranges. Dominica was a Catholic island: there was uproar when an outspoken newspaper editor—described in Rhys’s early story “Against the Antilles” as “a stout little man of a beautiful shade of coffee colour” who lived close to the Rees Williams’s house—criticised the money being spent on a new palace for the town’s Catholic bishop. When a band of angry women marched into town (“Against the Antilles” described the crowd as “throwing stones and howling for the editor’s blood”), the shutters of Bod Gwilym were closed and barred. Peeping over the edge of her hidden observation platform, Gwen saw the exhilaration in the women’s faces and understood it. As with the mob on the street, so it was indoors between Minna Lockhart and her timid, fiery daughter. Rage might hurt others; never oneself. Rage brought relief.

Standing with her family at an open window and dressed in her best clothes, little Gwen watched the town’s annual carnival with longing, waiting for the moment when she was allowed outside, just long enough to present a sixpence to the tall stilt-walker who always stopped to perform a stiff-legged dance beside Dr. Rees Williams’s house. Passionately, Gwen had wanted to join the whirling dancers, but she distrusted the brightly daubed wire masks that screened their watchful eyes from view. Once, not perhaps intending to frighten a nervous child, a kitchen visitor spoke in a strange falsetto voice and thrust a thick pink tongue through the white wire mesh that concealed darker skin. Gwen ran away crying. She was inconsolable. Later, Rhys would place that scene among Anna Morgan’s Caribbean recollections in Voyage in the Dark.

Grandest of all Roseau’s public spectacles were the religious processions led by the Catholic bishop and a retinue of stately priests in splendid robes. Watching from the broad wooden gallery that separated the doctor’s house from the street, young Gwen gazed out at a dazzle of colourful headdresses, banners and effigies. Listen hard enough, and she could hear the froufrou crackle of paper-hemmed petticoats worn under the ladies’ sweeping trains.

Catholicism played no active part in Gwen’s home life, but her father, the product of an Anglican upbringing in South Wales, often lunched with a friendly priest and he offered free medical advice at the Catholic Presbytery and the town’s convent school. Dr. Rees Williams was not considered a prejudiced man. He saw his white patients privately in the afternoons, but his mornings at the surgery which formed an extension wing to his house were reserved for the black islanders. All patients, black or white, were treated with equal courtesy and only Minna Lockhart raised objections when the doctor despatched his socially sensitive daughter to walk along the surgery queue with small offerings of bread or money.

The doctor’s wife cared more than her husband for how she, a proud Lockhart (one sister had married John Spencer Churchill, a former Governor of the Virgin Islands), would be perceived by those whom she regarded as her peers. Gwen’s father seems to have quietly favoured Catholicism although he was never a churchgoer, but on Sunday mornings, Minna Rees Williams and her children processed slowly up the hill from Bod Gwilym to St. George’s, the town’s Anglican church, built for the benefit of the island’s leading white families. A pause was always made beside the tiny grave of Gwen’s dead baby sister before the doctor’s wife swept on to take her position in a pew near the head of the nave, the preserve of the town’s white worshippers. Sometimes, bored of watching her mother fan her broad, expressionless face with a fronded palm leaf, Gwen tried to translate an impressive Latin wall tablet that honoured her great-grandfather, James Potter Lockhart. She learned a few of the punning words by heart, well enough to make later use of them, over and again, in her work: Locked Hearts I open. I have the heavy key.³

Rhys could always summon up Bod Gwilym in vivid detail. A framed dark print of Mary Queen of Scots being led to her execution hinted at the doctor’s Catholic sympathies. Recent copies of The Lancet and Cornhill magazine lay beside the armchair in which he relaxed on the long wooden gallery facing towards the street. Ripe mangoes dropped from the glossy-leaved garden tree that shaded both the smoky kitchen quarters and the cool, windowless room in which a vast stone trough of dark green water served as the family’s bath. Gwen preferred to wade—she disliked swimming—deep into one of the island’s innumerable forest pools.

The exactness and ease with which Jean Rhys could always evoke her family’s home in Roseau suggests that the town was where she had spent most of her early life. The memories were not always happy ones. Evening expeditions with her sea-loving father, rowing her across a wide bay spangled with tiny lights from the Roseau fishing boats, filled a nervous child with a dread that she failed to conceal. “You’re not my daughter if you’re afraid of being seasick,” a father chides the narrator of one of Rhys’s most troubling stories, “The Sound of the River.” “You’re not my daughter if you’re afraid of the shape of a hill, or the moon when it is growing old. In fact you’re not my daughter.”⁴

Less frightening was the annual summer journey in the hollowed-out trunk of a tree up the island’s west coast to Massacre. Gwen wouldn’t register until later that the village’s grim name recorded the murder in 1674 of Carib Warner, stately Sir Thomas Warner’s half-white rebel son, or that the English troops confronting him were led by the renegade’s white half-brother. For Gwen, Massacre simply marked the place where the Rees Williams family disembarked with their provisions, ready for the slow horseback ride up the 200-foot ascent to her personal favourite of their two summer homes.

Bona Vista was impetuously purchased by the doctor shortly after his move to Roseau, together with a smaller and almost adjoining inland estate called Amelia. Bona Vista stood high above the sea. Writing Voyage in the Dark in the early Thirties, Rhys gave them a combined identity with a Welsh name: “Morgan’s Rest.” From Bona Vista, she remembered: a hammock; a spyglass with which to spot the yellow flags of anchored, quarantined ships; a shadowy drawing room in which the children played halma and bezique on stormy afternoons; her father cradling a nervous, weeping wife in his arms while a high wind rattled the shutters and thunder rolled across the mountains. Evoking an unnamed Bona Vista in the early story she would title “Mixing Cocktails,” Rhys dwelt less upon her family’s “very new and very ugly house,” a bungalow on stilts, than on slow, dreamy days of watching the distant sea change from “a tender blue, like the dress of the Virgin Mary,” to a glitter of midday light and, finally, a rich sunset purple that she thought unique to the Caribbean (“The deepest, the loveliest in the world . . .”).^†

Bona Vista was where Rhys would choose to open the late memoir she named Smile Please. Posed centre stage for a photograph recording a family play—it had been arranged to honour her sixth birthday—Gwen wore a new white dress and a scented wreath of frangipani flowers. So attired, an improbable Red Riding Hood sat perched between her parents, all ready to receive a well-staged visit from her brothers; but Edward, the eldest boy, refused to perform in his role as the honest woodcutter, and Owen’s listless growls as he represented the wolf (in a trailing white sheet), failed to convince. Happy endings have no place in Rhys’s work. She remembered only a little girl’s sadness as she stared down at a picture of Miss Muffet and a hungry spider in the storybook (a birthday gift from Gwen’s grandmother in faraway South Wales) hesitantly placed on her lap as a consolation.

Gwen liked her older sister, Minna. She would miss the twelve-year-old girl when she went to live on another Caribbean island with the childless John Spencer Churchill and his wife, Edith (Gwen’s little-known “Aunt Mackie”), as the couple’s unofficially adopted daughter. Little Brenda was too young to become a playmate. Left in the company of her older brothers, Gwen felt excluded: a hanger-on. At the smaller Amelia estate (retained after the improvident doctor sold Bona Vista in order to save money), their tumbledown summer home was enclosed by broad mountains and luxuriant woods. Sometimes, Gwen trailed Edward and Owen when they set off armed with an old gun, exploring trails that led deep into the tangled green jungle. Once, wandering off on a separate track, away from the crackle of gunfire, she found herself standing alone and trembling with fear in an open, sunlit glade. Was she alone? “The sunlight was still, desolate and arid. And you knew something large was behind you. But what? A stranger? A ghost? You ran,” Rhys would later write about Julia Martin’s memory of a similar childhood adventure in her second novel, After Leaving Mr Mackenzie. “But when you got home you cried.”⁵

Dominica has more than 300 rivers. Rhys loved bathing in the island’s forest pools, some of which are fed by waterfalls. (Author picture)

Gwen saw little of her hard-working father at Bona Vista, since the ride up from his Roseau surgery took over three hours. At Amelia, however, where he tried to make a little money from growing crops, the doctor paid longer visits. Sometimes, he took his daughter along with him to examine a row of young nutmeg trees: in Voyage, Anna Morgan’s alert pair of eyes are sharp enough to help her father spot the critical difference between a male and female bud.

In Rhys’s memories, her father had always been gently encouraging, unjudgemental, trying to do what was best for his favourite child, while her mother missed no opportunity to crush and humiliate a daughter of whom she was perhaps a little jealous. She remembered how Minna Lockhart put an end to Gwen’s zealous attempts to teach the Amelia estate’s illiterate overseer to read, warning her that John’s jealous, cutlass-carrying wife might not appreciate the favour. When one of John’s village friends offered Mrs. Lockhart the princely dowry of one large yam to purchase her pretty daughter as his child bride, Minna shared the news with Gwen’s siblings and led the chorus of mockery. (And what would such a bride be required to do, young Gwen wondered after being puzzled and upset by the sight of her pet fox-terrier, Rex, rutting in a public place? Her mother wouldn’t say. Sex was a forbidden topic.)

Gwen was only three or four when she was taken on her first visit to Geneva, connected to Roseau by a steep and treacherous bridle track that ran south and then east across the southern end of the island before winding uphill to Mitcham House, the original family home of the Lockharts. Later, in one of the coloured exercise books which recorded her private thoughts and episodes for use in her fiction, Rhys wrote that Geneva—thinly disguised as “Constance” in Voyage in the Dark—was where she turned four. She remembered the exact year and setting because it was on her fourth birthday, in August 1894, that a local woman, young Elisa Farsa, shot herself on the public road, where a shoreside, slave-descended community were housed below the bluff that protected the Lockharts’ home from attack. Within the privacy of her notebooks, Rhys recorded Elisa’s name, the date and the place of her death over and again, sometimes changing her name to “Elisa Blank,” but without ever offering any explanation.⁶ Why did Elisa Farsa’s name carry such significance for Gwen? How had the poor young woman obtained a gun? Always discreet about a brother, Owen, who fathered two families on the island, and about her own father, a man who evidently enjoyed the company of women other than his wife, the older Rhys was never prepared to say. All she would acknowledge in Smile Please, a memoir written in her eighties, was that the doctor would “flirt outrageously” with any attractive visitor to their home, and that her mother might have minded more than she ever showed.

Riding from Roseau to Geneva one day with Aunt Brenda, her mother’s unmarried twin sister, as her guide, Gwen admired the stoicism with which her aunt continued the difficult, three-hour journey, despite having broken several ribs along the way when she was thrown off by her skittish mare. The Lockhart twins prided themselves on their riding skills. Timid Gwen preferred her father’s docile nags, Preston and March, to Aunt Brenda’s wild-eyed mount. Years later, Rhys would fondly name Antoinette Cosway’s obedient horse “Preston.”

Brenda Lockhart had helped to nurse Willie Rees Williams back to health when he fell ill shortly after his arrival on the island back in 1881. But if Aunt Brenda had briefly shared her twin’s hopes of exchanging an isolated life at Geneva for marriage and children, she bore no apparent grudge. To Gwen, it seemed that her mother, a silent, wary woman, only smiled and laughed when Brenda was with her, little though the twins appeared to have in common. Minna, despite a fondness for the lurid romances of Marie Corelli, disliked books, hated cleverness in a woman and saw no merit in giving her daughters an education. Brenda enjoyed the novels of Rhoda Broughton, a clever, progressive-minded writer who was regularly invited to dine alone with the ageing, London-based Henry James. Minna ordered two evening dresses a year from a London designer. Aunt Brenda, who dabbled in art, loved the theatre and wore dashing hats and the gowns she herself designed and stitched as skilfully as any French-trained couturier.

At Geneva, the unmarried Brenda Lockhart shared Mitcham House with the Woodcock sisters. Julia Lockhart, Gwen’s long-widowed granny, was a chatty old lady from St. Kitts whose favourite companion was the green parrot that perched, squawking, on her shoulder. Gwen’s granny would eventually provide Aunt Cora’s salty warning to Antoinette Cosway against marrying Mr. Rochester, although Granny Lockhart’s comment (“not if his bottom was stuffed with diamonds”) was toned down for the readers of Wide Sargasso Sea.⁷ Gwen formed a closer relationship with Julia’s unmarried sister, Jane Woodcock—a sprightly Victorian figure who once created, just for Gwen, an exquisite cardboard doll’s house: “Cardboard dolls with painted faces, cardboard tables and chairs, little tin plates for the dolls’ meals.”⁸ The house and its tiny inhabitants were Miss Woodcock’s consolation gift after a weeping Gwen confessed to having smashed a coveted doll that had been bestowed upon her little sister.

Gwen first heard the family history of the Lockharts from Jane Woodcock. The old lady didn’t always get the details right, but the version she provided took firm root in the mind of an impressionable child. Describing the fiery end of a decaying plantation house in Wide Sargasso Sea, Rhys modelled her account on Miss Woodcock’s descriptions of a marooned and besieged Geneva.

Long ago—as Aunt Jane explained—back in the 1760s, a family of French Protestants called Bertrand had given Geneva its name when they settled there during the island’s French occupation. (Calvinist Geneva had previously provided the Bertrands with a Swiss haven in Europe during times of religious persecution.) Sixty years later, Gwen’s acquisitive Lockhart forebear added Geneva to his growing portfolio of Dominican estates. James Potter Lockhart became rich; the dispossessed Bertrands vanished from history. Rhys was still brooding on the Lockharts’ takeover of Geneva when she gave the Bertrand family’s name to the most heartlessly treated figure in her last and best-known novel. “Who would have thought that any boy could cry like that?” demands an uncomprehending Mr. Rochester when the gentle island-bred Bertrand, known to him only as “the nameless boy,” weeps at being abandoned by the man he so admires: “For nothing. Nothing. . . .”⁹

Gwen hated everything Jane Woodcock told her about James Lockhart. Twice Governor of Dominica, the Scottish-born and London-bred businessman had made his fortune from the sugar mills that could crush a weary arm to pulp, and by the profitable trafficking of slaves from one island estate to another. Oil portraits of the white-haired planter and his pretty wife were prominently displayed in the dining room at Mitcham House; well out of view (and unportrayed) were the planter’s two slave-mistresses and their dark-skinned descendants: Gwen’s Lockhart cousins.

When Rhys was a child, she loved to visit her unmarried great-aunt Jane Woodcock, who lived at Mitcham House, Geneva with her sister, Rhys’s grandmother. The third figure is unidentified but may be Brenda Lockhart, Rhys’s aunt. (Hesketh Bell papers, Royal Commonwealth Society, Cambridge)

Jane Woodcock talked bluntly about an unscrupulous planter she had never known, whose fortune was made by driving harsh bargains during the last years in which slavery in the West Indies was still legal. Understandably, she spoke with more affection about James Lockhart’s son Edward, the man who had married her sister Julia. Perhaps Jane had never been told the truth about what happened six years before Julia and she came to Mitcham House from St. Kitts in 1850. Gwen learned from her only that Edward Lockhart had valiantly rebuilt the house she knew after its precursor had been burned to the ground by a rebel workforce. She heard that her grandfather Edward was “a mild man” and a kind employer. None of these statements was true.

In June 1844, a British attempt to gather statistics for an island census had aroused understandable fears of some cunning new form of enslavement among Dominica’s former slave population. When hints of a minor rebellion began to surface, suspected insurgents were brutally suppressed. One man was hanged for throwing a stone which had grazed the cheek of an estate owner. At Geneva, two women protesters were personally flogged by the sugar-mill manager, while “mild” Edward Lockhart joined forces with a local schoolteacher to vandalise the wooden fieldside homes of his workers. With Lockhart’s approval, the severed head of one alleged rebel was displayed on a pike.

Inevitably, there were reprisals. Talking to Gwen, old Jane Woodcock painted a lurid picture of angry workers burning Mitcham House to the ground. But the house that the former slaves destroyed had in fact belonged to the sadistic sugar-mill manager. All that Edward Lockhart lost were some of his chattels (beds, chairs, two pianos), which were carried out of his home and burned within view of Mitcham’s shuttered windows.

Dominica’s press did not hold back about the barbarous flogging of two women at the Geneva estate in the summer of 1844. In London, a disapproving House of Commons heard reports of “most wanton acts of cruelty” undertaken by “an attorney” at Geneva.¹⁰ (Edward Lockhart was a magistrate with legal powers.) Out on the island of Dominica, sympathy was in short supply for the destruction of Mrs. Lockhart’s pianos.

THERE WERE ALWAYS two worlds in Gwen’s life on Dominica and she made no secret of which of the two she preferred. It wasn’t in the company of her family that she stood on the shivering edge of the island’s treacherous Boiling Lake, where a volcanic underworld bubbled into view. Her mother could understand the Kwéyòl language, but it wasn’t Minna Lockhart or Gwen’s brothers who taught her the saucy words of local songs, or introduced her to the harrowing tales handed down by the French-speaking slaves of a former French colony to their freed descendants. Rhys may even have been drawing on a personal memory for her account of Antoinette Cosway running away as a child to live “with the fishermen and the sailors on the bayside,” before she is brought safely home to Coulibri.¹¹

Beyond the careful ritual of life in Dr. Rees Williams’s townhouse lay the vivid and forbidden world of the islanders. Describing the outspoken Martinique-born Christophine (who functions as Antoinette Cosway’s ally and spokeswoman in Wide Sargasso Sea), Rhys drew on personal memories of Anne Truitt, a tall, quiet woman who worked as a cook at Bona Vista—and later, at Mitcham House—until her arrest and conviction for practising obeah. Some form of voodoo was often secretly practised by the workforce of a colonial household in the 1890s; late on in life, Rhys casually remarked that Dominicans used to travel to Haiti to study obeah just as English students went to Oxford and Cambridge.¹²

Obeah was widespread in the West Indies during Gwen’s childhood. Gwen could easily have learned about it from “Francine,” the island-born girl whom Rhys would later describe as the closest friend of her childhood. Francine, first characterised in Voyage in the Dark as a free spirit with an enchanting gift for storytelling, led Gwen into a world that was meant to be hidden from a girl of her own class and colour. The abruptness with which an adolescent Francine disappeared from Gwen’s life was noted as sad, but unsurprising. An explanation, so Rhys opaquely commented in Smile Please, could be surmised. As with Elisa Farsa, a connection of the illicit kind practised by Gwen’s hated great-grandfather with his female slaves seems to be lurking here, just out of view. Was Francine compelled to leave after becoming involved with a male member of Gwen’s family? It’s far from impossible.

Part of Francine’s attraction for Gwen lay in the fact that such interracial friendships were frowned upon by a mother who was mocked in the Dominican newspapers for her haughty ways. Minna wanted her daughter to mix only with the well-dressed English children who occasionally visited Roseau with their parents from abroad, or from other islands. The British-born doctor was swift to grasp what his white Creole wife failed to understand: such aspirations were doomed to failure. Just as Gwen had been taught to keep her distance from village children, so visitors from England instructed their daughters to stay away from a mere colonial, a girl with a singsong accent, one who had never been to London and who actually enjoyed bathing naked in a river. The sense of not belonging—one which would become central to Rhys’s work—was born in the cruel, caste-conscious little world of Roseau. The only certain refuge lay in the books which Gwen began to read—after a start so slow that her parents grew concerned—as soon as she could spell out the words on a page. From that moment on, there was no holding her back.

*There is dispute about whether it was a slightly older or younger sister who died. Rhys herself had no doubt: “My mother had . . . two sons first, whom she really liked, then a daughter, then me, and after me, a little daughter who died . . .” (Jean Rhys to David Plante, nd, McFarlin, Plante Papers, 1987–007.15.f3). In “Heat,” an unashamedly autobiographical story set in 1902 (see Jean Rhys, The Collected Short Stories, Penguin, 1987. p. 283), the narrator mentions regular visits to the grave “of my little sister.” It seems best to trust Rhys herself on this unresolved issue.

†“Mixing Cocktails” and “Against the Antilles” were published in The Left Bank: Sketches and Studies of Present-Day Bohemian Paris by Jonathan Cape in 1927. Like Voyage in the Dark (Constable, 1934), these stories reflect Rhys’s earliest memories of the island more precisely than her later work.