November 14 2023
Dear All,
This month, back in Key West, I’m deep in the novels of a writer who published in the 1920’s and 30’s and then disappeared from view – Jean Rhys. Beginning with Miranda Seymour’s biography of a talented and hard-working writer and an obviously infuriating if much-loved woman, I then moved on to “Quartet” and “After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie” her earliest novels, and am working my way through her oeuvre. Why Jean Rhys, why now? She’s a sharp anti-dote to the sanctimoniousness of our time. It’s also comforting to me to think that a novel can strike such a chord nearly 100 years after it was written. I think of her, forgotten, poor and old, living in a mobile home in Devon in the 1950’s, not knowing that in a future century someone will be loving her work. And, she is so at odds with the mores of 2023: her heroines drink and take drugs and fall for impossible men and have sex with them, sometimes paid, and there’s no sign of redemption – only the honest yet ironic accounts of women’s lives, the refusal of hypocrisy or blame; the author’s own dry wit. I think she’s far more psychologically acute than Hemingway, who was writing at the same time in the same city – Paris – though she read and admired him. And there’s the added pleasure of her sense of place and atmosphere, the 5th and 6th arrondissements, so anyone who knows this part of Paris can follow her down those same streets. Her world is of seedy hotels, cheap restaurants, bars, prisons and railway stations. Her constant theme – poverty and its humiliations. Happily, her last novel “Wide Sargasso Sea”, a prequel to “Jane Eyre,” published in her old age, brought her renewed fame and money and she lived to be nearly 90.
Her books show me that there are pendulum swings in fame and fortune: greeted as avant-garde in the 1930’s, her books fell out of favor after World War 2, as people wanted reassurance and upbeat stories. In the 1960’s they were re-published, in the UK and the US, as remarkable works of their time. These days, we are back with censorship, ‘niceness’ and heroines we can approve of. Go figure, as people say…
My own new novel “Bone Whispers” is due out from Epicenter Press in mid-February 2024. A new collection of Key West short stories, “Light Over Islands,” as well as a re-edition of “Seas Outside the Reef” will also be available shortly. For an advance read of the “Light Over Islands” stories and a weekly series, illustrated by my daughter, Miranda Brackenbury, “A Game of Snakes and Ladders” about 50+ years of being published and not-published, go to rosalindbrackenbury.substack.com.
Here is one of Miranda’s beautiful illustrations.
Affectionately, Ros