Word: rhys
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...season, and the National Theater is mounting a musical by Marvin Hamlisch based on the life and death of Jean Seberg.) Ben Kingsley, the R.S.C. stalwart who won an Oscar playing Gandhi, has brought his one-man show on 19th century Actor Edmund Kean to the West End. Griff Rhys Jones, who mugged his way to TV celebrity on the BBC's Not the Nine O'clock News, is conducting a valiant but vain effort to revive the corpse of Charley's Aunt. Most of the cast treats this 1892 farce as reverently as if they were...
...dead we owe only the truth," said Voltaire. David Plante has given very little of either to the subjects of this memoir. Among the three "difficult women" in question, only Feminist Germaine Greer emerges from Plante's portrayal with a shred or two of personal dignity. Novelist Jean Rhys, who died in 1979, and Sonia Orwell, George Orwell's widow, who died a year later, have been observed in the distorting half-light of their declining days, when illness and alcoholism had served to dim the mind and obscure the spirit...
...Jean Rhys was almost 80 when she first encountered Plante, a young American writer living in London. Plante, who later became an accomplished novelist (The Family, The Woods), set out to help Rhys write an autobiography. He candidly recalls, "I wondered if my deepest interest in her was as a writer I could take advantage of." But the sentient novelist who had written the melancholy Good Morning, Midnight in 1939 was long gone. She spent most of their time together drinking gin and sweet vermouth and babbling away in a pitiful parody of her once considerable style and charm. Plante...
...Jean Rhys...
When Jean Rhys died last year at 89, she was at work on only her ninth book, an autobiography. But despite her small oeuvre, Rhys' literary reputation was secured by her haunting tales of women living at the edge, unprotected by family or money. Because the lives of her heroines often mirrored her own, she wanted to set the record straight. The first half of Smile Please is an exquisite memoir of young Jean's school days in Dominica, the West Indies, with its brilliant forests and its harsh contrasts in black and white. The second section details...