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Stage-struck (1907–13)

“I often wonder who I am and where is my country, and where do I belong . . .”

—Antoinette Cosway, Wide Sargasso Sea¹

DREAMING IN A rocking chair on the broad veranda of the Victoria Memorial Library, set high above Roseau’s glittering bay, Gwen Rees Williams had created an idealised Motherland from the books that she devoured. Snow—unimaginable in Dominica—would carpet the fields and “wolds” (whatever they might be). Fires would blaze in every grate. Bright trains, coloured like nursery toys, steamed into a theatre-filled London, a city where handsome gentlemen in gleaming top hats swept deep bows to beautiful ladies with rosy cheeks. A small but sturdy pink England presided over a reassuringly pink map of the world hanging on one of the library walls.

In the summer of 1907, a young colonial girl could confidently picture herself standing at the heart of the glorious Empire. For Rhys, the memory of that enchanting image would never fade. Writing about Antoinette Cosway, half a century later, she would confer on the Caribbean-born heroine of Wide Sargasso Sea (1966) precisely the same fantasies of “wolds” and a “rosy pink” Motherland that she would weave into her fragmented autobiography, Smile Please (1979).²

Arriving at the port of Southampton, Gwen peered out of her cabin’s porthole and realised that her imaginary England was no more than a fairy tale: “looking at the dirty grey water, I knew for an instant all that would happen to me. . . .”³ The train taking her up to London was brown and drab, as was—on an arid afternoon in late August—the great dusty city itself. The next day, disheartened by an early morning stroll around smoke-grimed Bloomsbury, Gwen decided to take a bath at the boarding house where she and Aunt Clarice were staying. Bathing reminded her of home and the pleasure of languid afternoons spent lazing with Francine in Dominica’s shadow-spattered forest pools. But a real bath, with taps that ran hot water: this was a novelty. Immersed, she decided to keep the stream of warm water running in. Content at last, Gwen started to sing.

As an older, self-searching writer, Rhys would cite that act of innocent self-indulgence to illustrate how, right from the start, she was made to feel like an outsider in England. The landlady was furious, as was her mortified aunt. Baths were still a luxury in 1907, even among the rich; it’s surprising that the boarding house even possessed one to offer to its lodgers. By using up an entire day’s supply of hot water, and without seeking permission, Gwen had committed her first offence. How could she be so thoughtless! “I’ve already noticed,” her aunt remarked tartly, “that you are quite incapable of thinking about anyone else but yourself.”⁴

Later in life, Rhys would come to appreciate that Clarice Rees Williams had been a thoughtful chaperone to her limp and unresponsive niece. Conducted around the sights of London—Westminster Abbey, St. Paul’s, the Wallace Collection, the Zoo—Gwen was unimpressed. How could a girl who grew up on an island alive with exquisite hummingbirds relish seeing those tiny symbols of freedom fluttering in a dark cage with a filthy floor? “The humming-birds,” Rhys wrote in Smile Please, “finished me.”

Gwen’s introduction to London was brief. In September, she went as a boarder to the Perse. The school, established in a substantial Georgian villa that stood on Union Road in the heart of Cambridge, had been successfully run for over twenty years by a formidable principal. Katherine Street—always addressed by the pupils as “Madam”—was a handsome woman with an understanding expression and long, thickly waving grey hair which she plaited up into a bun worn like a crown. Fictionalising the school in later years, Rhys unsubtly changed Miss Street’s name to Rode. “Miss Born” provided an equally thin disguise for Hannah Osborn, a sharp-faced retired teacher who would eventually share Miss Street’s Cambridge grave as her “beloved friend.”

Blanche Paterson (“Patey”), the relatively young teacher of classics, was Gwen’s favourite among the Perse staff. Patey once took her to visit Ely Cathedral, where Gwen was overwhelmed by the grandeur of the stone arches that soared above her. Perhaps their majestic height reminded a homesick girl of Dominica’s tall forests; seated at a ceremonious tea intended by Miss Paterson as a treat to complete the day’s excursion, Gwen grew so emotional that she dropped her delicate china cup and smashed it.

The staff at Perse School in Cambridge, where Rhys attended through the academic year of 1907–8. The principal, Katherine Street, sits centre front with her lifelong companion, Miss Hannah Osborn, seated on her left. (Used with permission of the Stephen Perse Foundation)

The teachers were kind, but Gwen’s schoolmates proved either tactless or cruelly snobbish. Mocking her singsong Caribbean lilt, they nicknamed the outsider “West Indies”; when Jane Eyre was announced as a set book, much fun was had about the fact that Bertha Antoinette Mason, presented by Charlotte Brontë as a red-eyed, grovelling maniac, was a white Creole—just like Gwen. It didn’t help that a fire broke out at the school, from a carelessly raked hearth, while the pupils were reading about Bertha Mason’s immolation of her husband’s Yorkshire manor house. Snide comments were made. The insult to a sensitive spirit was never forgotten or forgiven.

CAMBRIDGE ITSELF LEFT little impression on the newcomer, other than a faint enthusiasm for the Bridge of Sighs and a tender memory of the unknown young man who carefully helped pretty Gwen to her feet when she fell off her borrowed bicycle. On Saturdays, when she cycled out to visit her stately great-aunt’s home on Trumpington Road, Gwen was gently teased about her passion for poetry. White-haired and black-eyed, the long-widowed and still captivating Jeanette Potts—sister to Sophia Rees Williams—still retained signs of having been a celebrated beauty. She told Gwen a strange story of once having planned to leave her dour husband, a celebrated Cambridge mathematician, for a lover until she glimpsed the devil in a mirror, leering over her shoulder. Mrs. Potts unpacked her bag and stayed at home.

Gwen liked and respected Mrs. Potts, to whom she most likely owed her introduction to the Perse. Later, writing fragments of recollection in her notebooks, Jean Rhys would conflate this imposing representative of Cambridge’s academic world with her beloved great-aunt, out at Geneva. Jane Woodcock had been her loyal ally and favourite story-teller—and yet Gwen never again made contact with her, nor answered the old lady’s fond, enquiring letters. Ill at ease though Gwen might have felt in England, she had consciously severed herself from her past.

Mrs. Potts, well connected in the academic world, held out high hopes for her great-niece. The Perse specialised in turning out fine teachers; with diligence, Gwen Williams might even rise to become a headmistress. There was no doubting Gwen’s intelligence—she easily won the school’s top prize for ancient history—but she was too much of a rebel to embrace a future in the academic world. Dismay was caused when she submitted an essay on The Garden of Allah, by Robert Smythe Hichens, for her exam in English literature. The novel, a turgid but surprisingly popular account of a thirty-year-old woman who seeks spiritual meaning during a long journey across the Sahara, was not one of which the Perse approved. Perhaps Gwen picked it on purpose to annoy. By the summer of 1908, she already knew what she wanted to become, and it was not a teacher.

Aged almost eighteen, Gwen remained determined to go on stage. She took confidence from the resounding applause for her performance, in front of the assembled Perse parents, as the playfully dishonest Autolycus in The Winter’s Tale. Playing a male role once again, she was praised for her lively impersonation of the honest provincial, Tony Lumpkin, in Oliver Goldsmith’s She Stoops to Conquer.

“Overture and Beginners Please,” a late Rhys story that began life as an autobiographical vignette, describes the startled pleasure that Gwen felt when a Perse housemaid complimented her performance in the Shakespeare play. But it was one of the mothers—if Rhys’s fictional version can be trusted—who provided the necessary spur to action, asking her own daughter to tell the girl who had played Autolycus that she was “a born actress.” And then: “She says that you ought to go on the stage and why don’t you?”⁵ Gwen had already taken that decision when she wrote home to Roseau and asked permission to audition for acting school.

While Aunt Clarice disapproved of Gwen’s project as strongly as did Mrs. Potts, Dr. Rees Williams was pleased that Gwen had chosen a career for which she seemed to exhibit a genuine talent. Permission having been granted, the doctor’s confidence was rewarded by the news that his talented daughter had won a coveted place at Sir Herbert Tree’s new Acting School on Gower Street, the first of its kind in England. Today, we know that same school—greatly enlarged and modernised—as RADA.

A CAREER ON the English stage in 1909 offered enticing prospects to an ambitious young woman. The theatre certainly had its disreputable side, but no stigma attached to becoming a great actress—Ellen Terry, for example, or Mrs. Patrick Campbell—and Gwen was determined to become not merely good, but great. Aunt Clarice, while keeping a close eye on proceedings from a small flat that she had rented on Baker Street, soon found herself redundant. Gwen, having taken Bloomsbury lodgings of her own, was working hard. The school was coaching her in all the skills required for a stage career: gesture, fencing, and ballet. Elocution was taught by a gentle Mr. Heath until a snobbish senior student overruled his insistent mispronunciation of the word “froth” (“I’m not here to learn cockney,” she shrilled, or so Rhys recalled, decades later)—and got him sacked.⁶

To Clarice, Gwen reported that her prospects looked good; still only in her second term, she was regularly playing the lead in rehearsal scenes chosen from Shakespeare and Oscar Wilde. She wasn’t short of admirers. When a wealthy fellow student called Harry Bewes asked her to marry him, Gwen told her disconcerted aunt that she had turned the young man down in order to pursue her vocation.

Gwen’s acting apprenticeship was brief. Money was increasingly scarce in the Rees Williams household and the Tree school charged high fees. In June 1909, the doctor asked the academy’s head, Kenneth Barnes, for a candid view of his daughter’s prospects. Gwen was paying a dutiful visit to the family of her father’s older brother, Neville, up in Yorkshire when the bad news arrived. Equipped as she was with a seemingly ineradicable island lilt, Mr. Barnes had advised her father that Gwen could never achieve success as a serious actress. To continue with her lessons was—in Barnes’s opinion—a waste of money. Writing to his daughter, Willie Rees Williams gently explained that the time had come to renounce her dreams and return to her home in Roseau.

At the time, Gwen was devastated. Later, Jean Rhys’s chief concern would be to conceal the truth. Her father died the following year. By shifting the date of his death back to the previous summer—as she would do both in the story “Overture and Beginners Please” and in her memoir—Rhys managed to blame her swift departure from the acting school on Minna, the doctor’s unsympathetic and financially straitened widow. She never mentioned the verdict of Mr. Barnes. But from this time on, she would train herself to speak in a soft, whispering voice that concealed her origins. That cultivated whisper made it all the more shocking on the occasions when a seemingly ladylike young woman lost control over it and vented her fury in a voice that ranted and raved like a daemonic alter ego.

While disguising the reason for her sudden departure, Rhys was honest about the anguish that leaving the Tree school caused her. Fleeing Uncle Neville’s Harrogate home to take refuge at her aunt’s cosier Welsh cottage, Gwen dissolved into sobs. “You cry without reticence,” Aunt Clare remarks in “Overture and Beginners Please.” By the time Miss Rees Williams and her downcast niece returned to London from the tiny cathedral city of St. Asaph—Clarice still lived touchingly close to the rectory where she and her brothers grew up at Bodelwyddan—Gwen’s mind was already made up: whatever might become of her, she was not going back to Dominica.

Smile Please implies that Gwen’s next step was taken on a last-minute impulse, but it’s clear that she had formed a plan. While Clarice went shopping, her niece hurried off to London’s best-known theatrical agency, Blackmore’s, and requested an immediate audition. The approach, born of desperation, was audacious, but Gwen was exceptionally pretty and ready to display a fetching pair of slender ankles while forming the requested few dance steps.

Gwen left Blackmore’s armed with a renewable contract and a freshly minted stage name: Ella Gray. She was given orders immediately to join rehearsals with Sir George Dance’s second touring company. Her visit had been fortunately timed; the agents were giving the newcomer a chance to join the first summer tour of a musical comedy, Our Miss Gibbs, in which “Miss Gray” would form part of a chorus of implausibly glamorous shop assistants at “Garrods.” A wage of thirty-five shillings a week was expected to cover her travel, food and lodgings. The gorgeous costumes (sweat-stained hand-me-downs from the dancers in the grander London production of the same show) would be provided free of charge.

Rallying to this abrupt change of direction, Clarice chaperoned her unnervingly determined niece to the designated rehearsal space, a dingy room at the back of a sporting club off Leicester Square. The other girls liked sturdy, old-fashioned Clarice; they weren’t so sure about the pale, foreign-sounding girl she had brought along to join them. A friendly gentleman at Blackmore’s had already warned Gwen to keep quiet about her aspiration to become a serious actress. Doubtless, he also advised her to set aside any fantasies about marrying a peer. An English lord might—and often did—propose to one of the celebrated Gaiety Girls who frolicked through the London musicals presided over by Mr. George Edwardes (the great impresario of the day). No aristocrat would offer his name to a girl he’d found dancing in the chorus of a mere touring production.

The agent could warn Gwen, but she’d read too many romantic stories for him to crush a young girl’s hopes. Together with a small print of herself as a smiling young dancer (one who could also carry a tune), Rhys would lovingly preserve a photograph of pretty Nancy Erwin, a shrewdly knowing London chorus girl with a trademark quip. “My little bit of Scotch,” Nancy liked to trill as she flourished a tiny plaid handkerchief. Nancy’s marriage turned her into Lady Dalrymple Champneys, while pretty Rosie Boote became the Marchioness of Headfort. Constance Collier, once a Gaiety Girl, married two grandees in a row. Gertie Millar, a talented former mill girl (her first husband composed the songs for Our Miss Gibbs) became Countess of Dudley. “Ella Gray” might not be destined to become the next Sarah Bernhardt or Ellen Terry, but she could still look beyond the limited options of a touring chorus girl.

IN 1977, WHEN Jean Rhys was old and famous, she asked a new friend, a respected young actor, to make up her face with grease paint. Peter Eyre did his best. Rhys, elegantly dressed and sipping a martini, watched him closely in the mirror. There was no small talk. She simply observed. And then, so Eyre recalls, she just as simply asked him to depart. “I left her there alone, staring at herself in the mirror. And honestly, I still don’t have a clue what it was all about.”⁷

Perhaps, contemplating her rouged lips and cheeks through the eyes of the newcomer to the stage that she had once been, Rhys was wondering at her stamina in having survived those early years on tour. Perhaps she was remembering the noisy camaraderie and saucy jokes that brightened life in the restricted number of provincial lodging houses open to touring actors, often regarded as both immoral and unreliable payers of their bills. Was she recalling a chivalrously paternal old admirer called Colonel Mainwaring who had carried her off for a countryside tour in his clanking prewar motor car? Or might a frail old woman have been remembering an incident—one which she included in Smile Please’s light-hearted account of her years on tour—when she and a dancer pal leaped out of a bedroom window into a snowdrift and ran away from their lodgings, to escape paying an overcharged bill?

Like Colette, of whose 1910 novel about life on stage, The Vagabond, she would later become an ardent admirer, Rhys often conflated fact and fiction. In Smile Please, Rhys denied that reading formed any significant part of her life as a chorus girl. “I never felt the least desire to read anything . . . I think this indifference lasted a long time.”⁸ Reminiscing to her daughter, however, Rhys recalled in 1959 that the best part of a drizzly afternoon on tour was to curl up with a book: “There is always a fog or mist, so that warmth and a book indoors are heaven. All this was long ago when I was young and tough.”⁹

Rhys was a well-read woman, but she took peculiar care to conceal it. Writing her memoir, she would insist that she and the other chorus girls had spent their spare time reading one book, and one book only: The Forest Lovers. A hasty reader of Smile Please might assume that she was referring to an Edwardian page-turner of the frothiest sort.

Written by Maurice Hewlett, The Forest Lovers was nothing of the kind. A long, earnest and faintly ghoulish pastiche of a medieval romance, Hewlett’s novel follows the woodland adventures of Prosper le Gai who, having rescued a country maiden from being hanged as a witch by the simple act of marrying her, compels the unfortunate Isolt to earn his love by undergoing endless acts of submission. Her acquiescence borders on masochism. Was Rhys making sly use of Hewlett’s fiction to revisit Mr. Howard’s abusive games of submission, out in Roseau, or did she feel some troubled affinity to Hewlett’s compliant heroine? Impossible though it is to guess why Rhys singled out this justly forgotten novel for mention in her memoir, we shouldn’t assume that The Forest Lovers was the only work she devoured during those drizzly afternoons on tour, when losing herself in a book was “heaven.”

Our Miss Gibbs was not a production that demanded a great deal from its chorus. Lionel Monckton’s songs were beguiling; the dance steps were uncomplicated. Gwen enjoyed the chance to experiment with make-up; the exquisite dresses and spectacular hats for which the production was celebrated confirmed her lifelong love affair with millinery and pretty clothes. In Smile Please, Rhys would write that the other young actresses had disliked her and that the wardrobe mistress hated her. The jokes and banter that she had evoked over forty years earlier in Voyage in the Dark suggest otherwise. Reminiscing to a theatre-loving friend in the 1960s, a septuagenarian Rhys could still warble a cockney ditty from Ella Gray’s backstage days. It doesn’t sound plaintive.

’E doesn’t wear a collar

Or a shirt all white

’E wears a tidy muffler

And ’e looks all right

’E pays his little tanner

In the gallery with Anna.¹⁰

Ella—as the nineteen-year-old Rhys now became known to all her new friends—had been lucky to join Sir George Dance’s second touring company in July, at a time when Our Miss Gibbs was about to start visiting seaside towns along England’s sunny south coast. Ella’s summers, always the jolliest season for the hardworking chorus girls, were followed by a retreat to Clarice’s cottage at St. Asaph—or else to “The Cats Home,” a dingy London hostel for actresses who were short of cash—until the onset of the gruelling winter tour. Oldham; Leeds; Manchester; Southport; Newcastle (where Ella, like Anna Morgan in Voyage, got sick with pleurisy and had to be left behind for a grim three weeks): Rhys had good reason never to return to the north of England after visiting Leeds and Newcastle with Our Miss Gibbs. She liked the company of the funny, tough-talking girls whose life she shared. She grew tired of wearing handed-down dresses and of being treated as a second-class citizen: in short, as a chorus girl acting in the provinces. The touring chorus was where Rhys began; apart from a moment of relative glory, when she played one of three bold Irish colleens who briefly share centre-stage with Miss Mary Gibbs and her suitor, Lord Eynsford, the chorus was where she would remain.

Why did she carry on? An abundance of youthful optimism was the answer that Rhys would offer in her memoir: “Going from room to room in this cold dark country, I never knew what it was that spurred me on and gave me an absolute certainty that there would be something else before long . . . I was so sure.”¹¹

A more prosaic reason for persisting with her chorus work was the sudden death of Dr. Rees Williams, her adored father, in the summer of 1910. Bereft of his presence in Dominica, Rhys had no incentive to return home and no hope of receiving help from a destitute and suddenly isolated widow who still had a fifteen-year-old daughter on her hands. Owen had left the island in disgrace after the revelation of his second family (by a young woman who worked at the Amelia estate); Edward was travelling the world as an army medical officer. In England, a conspicuously unsuccessful young chorus girl now stood alone, helped only by an occasional handout from her kindly aunt in Wales. Uncle Neville, up in Yorkshire, had already made his disapproval of her life plain by severing all connection to his niece.

Tenacity was a quality that would always enable Jean Rhys to survive. What she never admitted in her memoir was how hard she had to struggle to stay afloat during those early years. Unable to afford time off after her second summer season with Our Miss Gibbs, Ella Gray snagged herself a walk-on role in a London pantomime before reluctantly applying to join a music-hall company touring the north through the dead of winter. Her role marked a new low in Rhys’s short-lived career on stage. For a sketch designed to entertain an undemanding audience, a comic twist had been added to Chantecler, a respected French play by Edmond de Rostand. “Chanteclair or High Cockalorum: a Feathered Fantasy in Three Fits” required the feather-costumed actresses to imitate hens. Audiences from northern England’s coalpits and steelworks proved unappreciative; pretending to lay an egg onstage troubled Rhys less than the thump of clogs as dissatisfied gallery-goers headed for the exit. With unfortunate timing, one mortified “hen” turned tail and pattered off stage on the night that the show’s manager was monitoring the performance. Sacked on the spot and despatched to London on the early morning train, a chastened Ella was taken in by the only member of the Rees Williams family who still had a genuinely soft spot for her: Clarice.

The future at that moment, early in 1911, must have appeared peculiarly grim. The contract with Blackmore’s ensured that Miss Gray could, if she so wished, continue dancing in a travelling show for another twenty years. The option wasn’t a tempting one. Desperate to avoid another brutal season of touring (one late story, “Before the Deluge,” mentions the unfortunate chorus girls being shipped off to Cork on a cattle boat), Rhys jumped at the possibility of filling a tiny spot in the London chorus of Franz Lehár’s charming new operetta, The Count of Luxembourg. Daisie Irving, a beautiful new friend who was standing in for the play’s star (the dazzling Lily Elsie had been taken ill, according to Rhys’s story), was willing to give the play’s director a gentle nudge.

Rhys identified this image of herself in her touring days of the ill-fated Chanteclair production, but the pretty hats are more likely to have been worn for Our Miss Gibbs, a musical celebrated for gorgeous millinery, rather than for a sketch in which the chorus girls were dressed as hens. (McFarlin)

The part was hers. Rhys’s appearance in The Count of Luxembourg marked the climax of her stage career. On the opening night in May 1911, Lehár himself was conducting the orchestra at Daly’s Theatre, and King George V and Queen Mary were watching from the royal box.

Seated below them in the stalls was a forty-year-old bachelor, a highly successful stockbroker whose well-connected father had recently been appointed Governor of the Bank of England. His name was Lancelot Hugh Smith.