简·里斯

简·里斯 CBE（Jean Rhys，/riːs/；1890年8月24日—1979年5月14日），出生名为艾拉·格温多琳·里斯·威廉斯（Ella Gwendolyn Rees Williams）是一名出身英国治下多米尼克罗索的20世纪女性作家，被公认是20世纪重要的女性作家，最被人津津乐道或是争议的作品是《梦回藻海》，彻底改写夏绿蒂·勃朗特的《简爱》，被视为是“一部以第三世界女性观点向帝国主义发出挑战的‘后殖民对抗论述’（postcolonial counter-discourse）”。

重要作品

《左岸及其他故事》（The Left Bank and Other Stories）

《姿态》（Postures）

在美国名为《四重奏》（Quartet），更被改编成同名电影

《离开麦肯齐先生以后》（After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie）

《黑暗中的航行》（Voyage in the Dark）

《早安，午夜》（Good Morning, Midnight）

《梦回藻海》Wide Sargasso Sea

Jean Rhys ( REESS; born Ella Gwendoline Rees Williams; 24 August 1890 – 14 May 1979) was a British Creole novelist who was born and grew up in the Caribbean island of Dominica. From the age of 16, she resided mainly in England, where she was sent for her education. She is best known for her final novel, Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), written as a prequel to Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre.

Rhys started writing intermittently around 1914, and found a literary mentor in Ford Madox Ford (with whom she also had an affair) in 1923. With his assistance and encouragement, her first work of fiction—The Left Bank and Other Stories—was published in 1927. This was followed by four short semi-autobiographical novels about women navigating perilous circumstances across London and Paris: Quartet (1928), After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie (1931), Voyage in the Dark (1934), and Good Morning, Midnight (1939). After these publications failed to lead to significant financial or critical success, Rhys felt her writing career had stalled, and largely withdrew from public life.

Following the publication of Wide Sargasso Sea, Rhys experienced a resurgence in popularity, and much of her earlier work was republished. Two further volumes of short stories followed, and her incomplete autobiography was published posthumously. In 1978, she was appointed a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) for her writing, just before her death in 1979.

Early life

Family heritage

Rhys's father, William Rees Williams (b. 1853), was a Welsh ship's medical doctor when, at the age of 27, he arrived in Dominica. In 1882, a year after he was established on the island, he married Minna Williams, née Lockhart (b. 1853), a third-generation white Dominican Creole of Scots ancestry.

("Creole" was broadly used in those times to refer to any person born on the island, whether they were of European or African descent, or both.) Rhys's maternal grandmother, born Jean Maxwell, may have had some Spanish ancestry.

Her mother's family had at one time been wealthy sugarcane plantation owners. Rhys's great-grandfather, James Potter Lockhart, had in 1824 purchased a 1,200-acre (485 hectares) estate that included 258 slaves. Rhys's cousins included mixed-race descendants of offspring that James Lockhart had sired with enslaved women. Though slavery was abolished in 1834, Rhys's grandfather Edward Lockhart organized the brutal suppression of an 1844 rebellion by exploited black laborers.

Five of the six children borne by Minna Williams survived to adulthood. Edward and Owen were the eldest. Third in birth order was Minna (named after her mother). Rhys was the fourth, called Gwen by her family, and born a year later. A fifth child, christened Brenda Gwenith, died in infancy. Brenda Clarice, born 1895, was the youngest of the five surviving children.

Class and race on Dominica

At the time of Rhys's birth in 1890, Dominica had been a possession of the British Empire for almost 100 years. The white population on the island numbered 300, and the black and indigenous people numbered 30,000, many of them were formerly enslaved.

The white colonial residents were strongly Anglophilic, though Rhys was herself of Welsh, Scottish and Irish background, rather than English. Rhys's father, Rees, was egalitarian in his medical practice, providing treatment to both white and black patients, and socialized with both rich and poor members of the community. While her father was content to see his daughter mix interracially, her mother Minna insisted she cultivate relationships with the well-to-do English children who visited the island. British subjects disparaged colonial whites, termed "Creoles"—identifiable by their distinctive accents.