Jean Rhys

Wide Sargasso Sea gives a childhood and a country to the woman Charlotte Brontë left locked upstairs at Thornfield Hall. Jean Rhys was 76 when it came out in 1966, after almost thirty years without a novel, a stretch long enough that readers who remembered her assumed she had died. Born Ella Gwendoline Rees Williams at Roseau, Dominica, in 1890 to a Welsh doctor and a mother descended from Scottish planters, she was sent to England at sixteen. Ford Madox Ford championed her first collection, The Left Bank and Other Stories, and wrote its preface when it appeared in 1927; four novels followed, ending with Good Morning, Midnight in 1939, and then nothing. The actress Selma Vaz Dias advertised in a newspaper in 1949 trying to find her for a radio adaptation, and the contact started her working again. Wide Sargasso Sea won the WH Smith Literary Award and the Heinemann Award. She was appointed CBE in 1978 and died at Exeter on 14 May 1979.