Awards

• Long-listed for Plutarch Award 2023

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9781324006121

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Reviews

Miranda Seymour has written a compelling and stylish new biography of Jean Rhys, whose life and work have often been cast in melancholic shadow. Seymour adds color and complexity to Rhys's story, and suggests the haunting influence of her early years on the Caribbean island of Dominica. This is a fresh, empathetic portrait of an iconic and unconventional woman writer whose searing novels of trauma, race, gender, and exile were ahead of their time. -- Heather Clark, author of Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath The multiple guises and conflicting personae of Jean Rhys-reckless and reclusive, captivating and appalling-demand a particularly agile biographer. Miranda Seymour is ideally suited to the task. An empathetic but unsparing critic, a tenacious and resourceful researcher, and a historian of literary cultures with a novelist's sense of the evocative detail, she has produced an enthralling biography of a haunting-and maddening-modern writer. -- Elaine Showalter, Professor of English, Emeritus, Princeton University

Miranda Seymour has written a compelling and stylish new biography of Jean Rhys, whose life and work have often been cast in melancholic shadow. Seymour adds color and complexity to Rhys's story, and suggests the haunting influence of her early years on the Caribbean island of Dominica. This is a fresh, empathetic portrait of an iconic and unconventional woman writer whose searing novels of trauma, race, gender, and exile were ahead of their time. -- Heather Clark, author of Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath The multiple guises and conflicting personae of Jean Rhys-reckless and reclusive, captivating and appalling-demand a particularly agile biographer. Miranda Seymour is ideally suited to the task. An empathetic but unsparing critic, a tenacious and resourceful researcher, and a historian of literary cultures with a novelist's sense of the evocative detail, she has produced an enthralling biography of a haunting-and maddening-modern writer. -- Elaine Showalter, Professor of English, Emeritus, Princeton University It's a high-wire act to hold so witty and eloquent a balance between this writer's recklessness and diligence. The honesty too is appealing, the acknowledgement of dark places no one can fully visit. -- Lyndall Gordon, author of Outsiders: Five Women Writers Who Changed the World Brilliantly written, compulsively readable, and insightful, Miranda Seymour's biography does full justice to a remarkable and complex life. -- Pat Barker, author of The Women of Troy and The Silence of the Girls One of Miranda Seymour's finest biographies, this is an utterly riveting voyage into a writer's mind. You can almost feel Jean Rhys breathing in the room, and what a ferociously complicated woman she was! I was spellbound from start to finish. -- Deborah Moggach, author of These Foolish Things and Tulip Fever Compelling.... An elegant work that provides readers with a better understanding of a beloved author's life. -- Kirkus, starred review

Author Information

Miranda Seymour is a British biographer whose acclaimed books include biographies of Jean Rhys; Lord Byron’s wife and daughter, Annabella Milbanke and Ada Lovelace; Mary Shelley; and Ottoline Morrell. She lives in Nottinghamshire, England.

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