I Used To Live Here Once: The Haunted Life of Jean Rhys
By Miranda Seymour
WW Norton 2022

The author known as Jean Rhys wrote quite a bit before 1966 and quite a bit after, but she’s principally known only for the novel she wrote in that year, Wide Sargasso Sea, her messy and moving ideological prequel to Jane Eyre. The novel largely eluded the critics of the day, but it renovated its author’s career, provided her with some desperately-needed financial security, and very quickly entered the canon as a much-read, much-adapted, and much-taught feminist and anti-colonialist foregrounding of its model’s “madwoman in the attic.” 

So great has been the book’s fame that it can overshadow the author’s life. This is an imbalance all biographers of this particular writer have had to deal with. Lilian Pizzichini attempted to deal with it in her 2009 book The Blue Hour and largely succeeded, and now experienced biographer Miranda Seymour enters the lists with her new book I Used To Live Here Once: The Haunted Life of Jean Rhys, which takes a more thoughtfully plangent approach to its subject than any previous biographical attempt except Rhys’s own 1979 book Smile Please. 

Rhys led what outwardly appears to have been a fairly wretched life, half of it in grinding poverty, half of it in post-hit obscurity, some of it frequently punctuated by death and bad love, and almost all of it absolutely soaking with alcohol. She was born and raised on the Caribbean island of Dominica, and the colors and lush harshness of the place flash into prominence time and again throughout her writings. But as Seymour points out, the author’s family home there was demolished in 2020. “There would be no return. There was no need. The island that had cast its haunting spell over Rhys’s imagination would live on, enduringly, in her work.” Thus even from its title, I Used To Live Here Once is very much a ghost story.

Two things become obvious fairly quickly while reading this ghost story. The first is that Seymour has thoroughly researched every last moment of her subject’s life, never resting on consensus and (wisely) never completely trusting Rhys herself about anything. At every turn, even on comparatively minor matters, Seymour seems to have read everything and weighed it all carefully, as with an early country anecdote:

The best-known account of what happened during Rhys’s stay in the Gloucestershire cottage would eventually be published in 1960, in a story which had passed through many stages of careful revision. “Till September Petronella” mixes fact with fiction as bewilderingly as does the account of this same country holiday that Rhys had earlier described in the unpublished “Triple Sec.” Only by comparing both of these versions of events with a third – the more artless account offered in Adrian Allinson’s unpublished memoir “A Painter’s Pilgrimage” – can we glimpse what actually took place in that crowded cottage. 

The second very noticeable thing about this book is its most pleasant surprise: the crisp, punchy eloquence of Seymour’s own prose, unlike its subject’s in incipient tension but very much alike in its ability to serve up an entire world in just a few lines:

Back in the 1940s, the proud new borough of Beckenham was an exceptionally decorous suburb. Civic parades were opened by sensibly shod ladies with large hats and double-barrelled names; the local tennis club and sports grounds, sponsored by Beckenham’s sturdy new row of provincial banks, were well attended. So was the old grey church of St. George’s, which stood guard high above Beckenham’s winding hillside high street. No church-goer herself, [Rhys’s] preferred weekly appointment was with the local hairdresser to whom she repaired for a shampoo and set whenever a disquietingly flirtatious husband seemed about to stray. 

Amusingly, Seymour saves the fireworks until after the book proper has ended. In a brief final section called “Afterlife,” she relates a bit of the explosive furor surrounding novelist David Plante’s infamous 1980 characterization, at a PEN gala in her honor no less, of Rhys as “a silly, bigoted woman” and the fierce denunciations that followed. This mention happens as part of one final almost wistful consideration on Seymour’s part of “a novelist whose softly insistent, knowing, and sui generis voice speaks with more power to our times even than to her own.” 

-Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Washington Post, The American Conservative, The Spectator, The Wall Street Journal, The National, and the Daily Star. He writes regularly for The Boston Globe, the Vineyard Gazette, and the Christian Science Monitor. He’s a books columnist for the Bedford Times Press and the Books editor of Big Canoe News in Georgia, and his website is http://www.stevedonoghue.com.