In her four exquisite between-the-wars novellas, set among the half-shadowed demimonde of Paris and London, Jean Rhys wrote of the horror of a series of small rooms, from dreary Paddington bedsits to ...

The best biographies marry the talents of a perceptive biographer and a complicated subject. In Miranda Seymour's new biography of British writer Jean Rhys, readers will find a perfect match. Seymour ...

Most writers aren’t nearly as interesting as readers might imagine. Jean Rhys, though, was not like most writers. She was painfully shy when sober and dangerously unhinged when not; the story of her ...

Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter. As literary second acts go, it was sensational. The former chorus girl, a white Creole demi-mondaine, a ...

Banks is former editor in chief of Bookforum. Most writers aren’t nearly as interesting as readers might imagine. Jean Rhys, though, was not like most writers. She was painfully shy when sober and ...

In June 1931, in a letter to her friend and fellow writer Evelyn Scott, Jean Rhys spelled out a recurring, and apparently insoluble, problem that she had with publishers: “I am always being told that ...

From reproductive rights to climate change to Big Tech, The Independent is on the ground when the story is developing. Whether it's investigating the financials of Elon Musk's pro-Trump PAC or ...

Chris Power talks to Atticus Lish about his new novel The War for Gloria. Plus revisiting Jean Rhys with Miranda Seymour and Jo Hamya. Show more Chris Power talks to Atticus Lish, the ex-Marine whose ...

In 1979, some months after Jean Rhys died at 88, her unfinished autobiography, Smile Please, was published. It is fractured and elliptical, emblematic of her life, which was as complicated as it was ...