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A View of the Empire at Sunset
A gripping novelization of the life of Jean Rhys, the author of Wide Sargasso Sea
Caryl Phillips’s A View of the Empire at Sunset is the sweeping story of the life of the woman who became known to the world as Jean Rhys. Born Ella Gwendolyn Rees Williams in Dominica at the height of the British Empire, Rhys lived in the Caribbean for only sixteen years before going to England. A View of the Empire at Sunset is a look into her tempestuous and unsatisfactory life in Edwardian England, 1920s Paris, and then again in London. Her dream had always been to one day return home to Dominica. In 1936, a forty-five-year-old Rhys was finally able to make the journey back to the Caribbean. Six weeks later, she boarded a ship for England, filled with hostility for her home, never to return. Phillips’s gripping new novel is equally a story about the beginning of the end of a system that had sustained Britain for two centuries but that wreaked havoc on the lives of all who lived in the shadow of the empire: both men and women, colonizer and colonized.
A true literary feat, A View of the Empire at Sunset uncovers the mysteries of the past to illuminate the predicaments of the present, getting at the heart of alienation, exile, and family by offering a look into the life of one of the greatest storytellers of the twentieth century and retelling a profound story that is singularly its own.
Caryl Phillips’s A View of the Empire at Sunset is the sweeping story of the life of the woman who became known to the world as Jean Rhys. Born Ella Gwendolyn Rees Williams in Dominica at the height of the British Empire, Rhys lived in the Caribbean for only sixteen years before going to England. A View of the Empire at Sunset is a look into her tempestuous and unsatisfactory life in Edwardian England, 1920s Paris, and then again in London. Her dream had always been to one day return home to Dominica. In 1936, a forty-five-year-old Rhys was finally able to make the journey back to the Caribbean. Six weeks later, she boarded a ship for England, filled with hostility for her home, never to return. Phillips’s gripping new novel is equally a story about the beginning of the end of a system that had sustained Britain for two centuries but that wreaked havoc on the lives of all who lived in the shadow of the empire: both men and women, colonizer and colonized.
A true literary feat, A View of the Empire at Sunset uncovers the mysteries of the past to illuminate the predicaments of the present, getting at the heart of alienation, exile, and family by offering a look into the life of one of the greatest storytellers of the twentieth century and retelling a profound story that is singularly its own.
324 pages, Hardcover
First published May 22, 2018
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1522 people want to read
About the author
Caryl Phillips
51 books215 followers Caryl Phillips was born in St.Kitts and came to Britain at the age of four months. He grew up in Leeds, and studied English Literature at Oxford University.
He began writing for the theatre and his plays include Strange Fruit (1980), Where There is Darkness (1982) and The Shelter (1983). He won the BBC Giles Cooper Award for Best Radio Play of the year with The Wasted Years (1984). He has written many dramas and documentaries for radio and television, including, in 1996, the three-hour film of his own novel The Final Passage. He wrote the screenplay for the film Playing Away (1986) and his screenplay for the Merchant Ivory adaptation of V.S.Naipaul's The Mystic Masseur (2001) won the Silver Ombu for best screenplay at the Mar Del Plata film festival in Argentina.
His novels are: The Final Passage (1985), A State of Independence (1986), Higher Ground (1989), Cambridge (1991), Crossing the River (1993), The Nature of Blood (1997), A Distant Shore (2003), Dancing in the Dark (2005), In the Falling Snow (2009), The Lost Child (2015), A View of the Empire at Sunset (2018) and Another Man in the Street (2025). His non-fiction: The European Tribe (1987), The Atlantic Sound (2000), A New World Order (2001), Foreigners (2007), and Colour Me English (2011). He is the editor of two anthologies: Extravagant Strangers: A Literature of Belonging (1997) and The Right Set: An Anthology of Writing on Tennis (1999). His work has been translated into over a dozen languages.
He was named Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year in 1992 and was on the 1993 Granta list of Best of Young British Writers. His literary awards include the Martin Luther King Memorial Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a British Council Fellowship, a Lannan Foundation Fellowship, and Britain's oldest literary award, the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, for Crossing the River which was also shortlisted for the 1993 Booker Prize. A Distant Shore was longlisted for the 2003 Booker Prize, and won the 2004 Commonwealth Writers Prize; Dancing in the Dark won the 2006 PEN/Beyond the Margins Award. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and the Royal Society of the Arts, and recipient of the 2013 Anthony N. Sabga Caribbean Award for Excellence.
He has taught at universities in Ghana, Sweden, Singapore, Barbados, India, and the United States, and in 1999 was the University of the West Indies Humanities Scholar of the Year. In 2002-3 he was a Fellow at the Centre for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library. Formerly Henry R. Luce Professor of Migration and Social Order at Columbia University, he is presently Professor of English at Yale University. He is an Honorary Fellow of The Queen's College, Oxford University.
A regular contributor to The Guardian and The New Republic, his most recent book is, Another Man in the Street.
(taken from carylphillips.com official web site)
He began writing for the theatre and his plays include Strange Fruit (1980), Where There is Darkness (1982) and The Shelter (1983). He won the BBC Giles Cooper Award for Best Radio Play of the year with The Wasted Years (1984). He has written many dramas and documentaries for radio and television, including, in 1996, the three-hour film of his own novel The Final Passage. He wrote the screenplay for the film Playing Away (1986) and his screenplay for the Merchant Ivory adaptation of V.S.Naipaul's The Mystic Masseur (2001) won the Silver Ombu for best screenplay at the Mar Del Plata film festival in Argentina.
His novels are: The Final Passage (1985), A State of Independence (1986), Higher Ground (1989), Cambridge (1991), Crossing the River (1993), The Nature of Blood (1997), A Distant Shore (2003), Dancing in the Dark (2005), In the Falling Snow (2009), The Lost Child (2015), A View of the Empire at Sunset (2018) and Another Man in the Street (2025). His non-fiction: The European Tribe (1987), The Atlantic Sound (2000), A New World Order (2001), Foreigners (2007), and Colour Me English (2011). He is the editor of two anthologies: Extravagant Strangers: A Literature of Belonging (1997) and The Right Set: An Anthology of Writing on Tennis (1999). His work has been translated into over a dozen languages.
He was named Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year in 1992 and was on the 1993 Granta list of Best of Young British Writers. His literary awards include the Martin Luther King Memorial Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a British Council Fellowship, a Lannan Foundation Fellowship, and Britain's oldest literary award, the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, for Crossing the River which was also shortlisted for the 1993 Booker Prize. A Distant Shore was longlisted for the 2003 Booker Prize, and won the 2004 Commonwealth Writers Prize; Dancing in the Dark won the 2006 PEN/Beyond the Margins Award. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and the Royal Society of the Arts, and recipient of the 2013 Anthony N. Sabga Caribbean Award for Excellence.
He has taught at universities in Ghana, Sweden, Singapore, Barbados, India, and the United States, and in 1999 was the University of the West Indies Humanities Scholar of the Year. In 2002-3 he was a Fellow at the Centre for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library. Formerly Henry R. Luce Professor of Migration and Social Order at Columbia University, he is presently Professor of English at Yale University. He is an Honorary Fellow of The Queen's College, Oxford University.
A regular contributor to The Guardian and The New Republic, his most recent book is, Another Man in the Street.
(taken from carylphillips.com official web site)
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 82 reviews
June 10, 2020
A haunting dramatization of the personal life of West Indian born author Jean Rhys.
Ella Gwendolyn Rees Williams was born on the island of Dominica in 1890. “Gwen” was sent off to school in England at age 16 where she was made to feel very much the outsider due to her West Indian accent. This uncomfortable feeling of being an outsider stayed with her, it seems, for all of her life. It is not surprising then that she proceeded to lead a rather unconventional life starting out as a minor actor in minor stage productions.
Author Phillips has included almost nothing of note regarding Rhys’ writing. Instead this is a treatise on her personal life written with verve and thoughtfulness in an elegant prose.
Ella Gwendolyn Rees Williams was born on the island of Dominica in 1890. “Gwen” was sent off to school in England at age 16 where she was made to feel very much the outsider due to her West Indian accent. This uncomfortable feeling of being an outsider stayed with her, it seems, for all of her life. It is not surprising then that she proceeded to lead a rather unconventional life starting out as a minor actor in minor stage productions.
Author Phillips has included almost nothing of note regarding Rhys’ writing. Instead this is a treatise on her personal life written with verve and thoughtfulness in an elegant prose.
April 26, 2018
3.5
I read The Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys some years ago and found the novel an unforgettable prequel to Jane Eyre from the viewpoint of Rochester's 'mad' wife.
Rhys vividly described the Caribbean childhood of Antoinette Cosway Rochester, a beautiful Creole whose family entraps Mr. Rochester into marriage. Rhys interprets Antoinette as the victim of a man repulsed by the sensuality of the Caribbean culture and horrified by female sexuality.
When I saw that Caryl Phillips' novel A View of the Empire at Sunset was based on the life of Gwendolyn Rees Williams, who wrote as Jean Rhys, I was eager to read it. I expected passion and glamour and agony.
Gwen was the child of a British man and a Creole woman, unhappily paired. Dominica is beautifully described, the "raucous cacophony of cicadas and frogs," the bats around the mango trees, the mosquitos and the "sickly sweet aroma of the night lilies.'
At sixteen, Gwen was forced from her beloved homeland to be educated in England under her aunt's care. She never really adjusts. She leaves school for the theater and music halls, is taken as a mistress then discarded, becomes a prostitute, has an abortion, is married several times. She drinks too much. Her older brother suffers from "delusions and bouts of agitated mania."
The novel opens in 1936 when Gwen and her husband return to her homeland. They are unhappily paired, but Gwen thinks that if he could see her roots perhaps he would understand she is not of his world. When he sees the view of the empire at sunset, there would be understanding that she could never really be English. Gwen learns that she can't go home again.
Gwen's literary life is outside of the novel, concentrating on her personal life. The "Empire at sunset," the Edwardian Age and colonization in Dominica, is vital to the story.
The novel offered me an understanding of Gwen's darkness and disorientation, her lack of options, the sad feeling of being the temporary object of men's desire. And I saw how young Gwen was devalued in her homeland, not British enough to be respectable, too hoyden and uncivilized, too close to the Negro servants.
And unforgettable was the ending, Gwen and her husband at the burned ruins of her family home, unable to grasp why the Negros would have destroyed such a beautiful place, the sins of colonization beyond their understanding. But I was disappointed in the emotional distance I felt, especially when I expected some of the pathos and passion of Rhys's writing.
I received a free ebook from the publisher through NetGalley in exchange for a fair and unbiased review.
I read The Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys some years ago and found the novel an unforgettable prequel to Jane Eyre from the viewpoint of Rochester's 'mad' wife.
Rhys vividly described the Caribbean childhood of Antoinette Cosway Rochester, a beautiful Creole whose family entraps Mr. Rochester into marriage. Rhys interprets Antoinette as the victim of a man repulsed by the sensuality of the Caribbean culture and horrified by female sexuality.
When I saw that Caryl Phillips' novel A View of the Empire at Sunset was based on the life of Gwendolyn Rees Williams, who wrote as Jean Rhys, I was eager to read it. I expected passion and glamour and agony.
Gwen was the child of a British man and a Creole woman, unhappily paired. Dominica is beautifully described, the "raucous cacophony of cicadas and frogs," the bats around the mango trees, the mosquitos and the "sickly sweet aroma of the night lilies.'
At sixteen, Gwen was forced from her beloved homeland to be educated in England under her aunt's care. She never really adjusts. She leaves school for the theater and music halls, is taken as a mistress then discarded, becomes a prostitute, has an abortion, is married several times. She drinks too much. Her older brother suffers from "delusions and bouts of agitated mania."
The novel opens in 1936 when Gwen and her husband return to her homeland. They are unhappily paired, but Gwen thinks that if he could see her roots perhaps he would understand she is not of his world. When he sees the view of the empire at sunset, there would be understanding that she could never really be English. Gwen learns that she can't go home again.
Gwen's literary life is outside of the novel, concentrating on her personal life. The "Empire at sunset," the Edwardian Age and colonization in Dominica, is vital to the story.
The novel offered me an understanding of Gwen's darkness and disorientation, her lack of options, the sad feeling of being the temporary object of men's desire. And I saw how young Gwen was devalued in her homeland, not British enough to be respectable, too hoyden and uncivilized, too close to the Negro servants.
And unforgettable was the ending, Gwen and her husband at the burned ruins of her family home, unable to grasp why the Negros would have destroyed such a beautiful place, the sins of colonization beyond their understanding. But I was disappointed in the emotional distance I felt, especially when I expected some of the pathos and passion of Rhys's writing.
I received a free ebook from the publisher through NetGalley in exchange for a fair and unbiased review.
May 3, 2018
Good God, what a gloomy book. The sections in sun-drenched Dominica are gloomy, the parts in dank, unfriendly pre-war England are gloomy, Gwen's depressed, and everyone else in the book is on the brink of suicide, or maybe just past. No, I couldn't finish.
I was very excited about this novel considering that "Wide Sargasso Sea" was such a touchstone novel for many, the first of the series of novels to come of famous stories told from another point of view. The author's story must be fascinating, I thought, growing up in the Caribbean and moving to England for school, working in the theater, all that. Nope.
Caryl Phillips writes well, but this story is way too much of a slog. Was every moment of her life awful? Did I give up before the bright spots? Maybe. But I think not.
I was very excited about this novel considering that "Wide Sargasso Sea" was such a touchstone novel for many, the first of the series of novels to come of famous stories told from another point of view. The author's story must be fascinating, I thought, growing up in the Caribbean and moving to England for school, working in the theater, all that. Nope.
Caryl Phillips writes well, but this story is way too much of a slog. Was every moment of her life awful? Did I give up before the bright spots? Maybe. But I think not.
May 18, 2018
Phillips is a wonderful writer and I liked A View of the Empire at Sunset which was a fictionalized story about the writer Jean Rhys’s life beginning told fro the early part of the 20th century onwards. The setting goes between her childhood years in the West Indies, Dominica, and England where she went to complete her schooling and escape her tense relationship with her mother. After a year of being bullied at the Persce School she began a new life as a drama student.
Her accent always seems to be a problem with her peers and on stage so she begins to drift, marrying a few times neither happily. One of her husbands was a publisher however so something positive came out of the arrangement. Rhys’s was a sad life so this isn’t a light feel good beach read but I enjoyed learning some of what inspired or drove the writer of The Wide Sargasso Sea.
Thank you to the publisher for supplying an ecopy.
Her accent always seems to be a problem with her peers and on stage so she begins to drift, marrying a few times neither happily. One of her husbands was a publisher however so something positive came out of the arrangement. Rhys’s was a sad life so this isn’t a light feel good beach read but I enjoyed learning some of what inspired or drove the writer of The Wide Sargasso Sea.
Thank you to the publisher for supplying an ecopy.
October 1, 2019
I almost stopped reading this novel/fictionalized account of the life of Jean Rhys (author of The Wide Sargasso Sea) a few times, but I didn't. It's chilly, and distant, and formal, and difficult to get a grasp on the souls of the characters, and for those reasons I kept on. You don't have to know who Jean Rhys is to read it. You don't even have to know it's a fictionalized/true account of a part of her life. The flyleaf describes the book as being, in part, about the end of the British Empire in the West Indies, as told through the story of a young girl, raised in the West Indies by a doctor father who is the medical authority for all of Domenica, and a West Indian mother with a family estate. When the mother seems not to want her daughter, the girl is sent away to England for schooling, and the book follows her life at boarding school, in drama school, where she learns she will never be a great stage actress because of her speech patterns, and as she becomes a chorus girl, traipsing from town to town, being adored, or otherwise, by men who want her and then don't want her. It's about empire, about race, about the strictures on women in those days. It's told mostly in short chapters, going back and forth in time. What's interesting about the novel is that Jean Rhys as a writer is given very short shrift. Nor does she have much of a voice. It's rare that she has actual direct dialogue, and infrequently, she speaks directly to the reader, or rather to herself. It's a strange book, a page turner for me because I was fascinated to see how the author was putting this together. How do you write a novel like this in which the main character is barely present in her own life? There is interior thought, but not much on the psychological level. Why did she stay in England for so long instead of returning home to the West Indies, where she wouldn't have felt so vague and amorphous? She went to England, then to various other countries with one husband, then back to England, separated, then ostensibly divorced, living in unfortunate circumstances. Why did she marry the men that she did? Why did she abandon her own daughter to the girl's father? How did she start writing? Why did she start writing? How does a woman who becomes a writer, who is still read today, and who takes in all the details around her, have so slight a presence. This is a novel for serious readers.
November 22, 2018
Amazing read! Caryl Phillips never disappoints me.
December 1, 2018
Painful. Just painful. The writing style made what might have been a good story, into a torturous read. Phillips moved from present tense to past tense, sometimes in the same paragraph, and without any rhyme or reason that I could discern. Back and forth he went, and each time it jarred me. Then there was the continual use of "he" or "she" rather than, oh heaven forbid, using a character's name. Most of the time I figured out who the author was talking about, but not always, and the work involved took me out of the story.
At times there would be narratives from points of view other than Gwen's, but without any meaningful transition from, or relation to, Gwen's story. Again, just another way to distance the reader.
Then there were the time jumps. I would be reading along, starting to get into it, and then a chapter would end and the next chapter would start, but it would be sometimes years later, sometimes months later, and with no point of reference as to when we were or what happened in the interim. Sometimes the new chapter would feature characters who appeared out of the blue, with no explanation as to who they were. Did I mention this sort of thing took me out of the story?
Then there were the more minor pet peeves. Everytime I see "alright" used in a work of fiction published by a major publishing house, I want to scream and wail. It's not a word.
And, the use of "Negro" and, even worse, "Negress." Nails on a chalkboard. I get this is a book set beginning in 1901 and ending sometime just before the second World War. I get it. It's historical, and the English in the islands probably did refer to black people that way. I read a lot of historical fiction, and I am not someone who insists that my historical fiction be sanitized to the political correctness standards of 2018. Yes, racism among the English colonists in the West Indies probably was rampant. Using that word clearly demonstrated just how racist these people were. But, really. These were people. Saying "Negress" was making a woman into an animal, like "lioness." I guess once or twice might have been enough to convey the racism in that society, but there was not one single reference to people of African heritage using any word other than "Negro" or "Negress." It was overkill. I cringed every time I read it. Took me out of the story.
And with all of these writing issues, there was so much taking me out of the story, that I wasn't in the story at all! Which brings me to the main problem: characterization. I edit fiction, and writers' workshops are always emphasizing, "show, don't tell." Phillips does nothing but tell. Sorry, to me it's not "literary;" it's just bad writing! Plain and simple. Telling, not showing, meant the characters were flat and two-dimensional. Even Gwen. And since Gwen was clearly a woman who struggled with depression, low self-esteem, and alcoholism, it was a painful read. Because of the poor writing choices separating me from her, I couldn't care enough about her to want to devote the time to share her journey and endure her depression and try to understand or empathize. Instead...it was just boring and depressing. Since I wasn't "in her head," there was no real understanding of why she did what she did. She just drifted along.
All in all, a painful read. Had it not been that this was a book club book, I would never have gotten past a hundred pages. I will never read anything else by this author.
At times there would be narratives from points of view other than Gwen's, but without any meaningful transition from, or relation to, Gwen's story. Again, just another way to distance the reader.
Then there were the time jumps. I would be reading along, starting to get into it, and then a chapter would end and the next chapter would start, but it would be sometimes years later, sometimes months later, and with no point of reference as to when we were or what happened in the interim. Sometimes the new chapter would feature characters who appeared out of the blue, with no explanation as to who they were. Did I mention this sort of thing took me out of the story?
Then there were the more minor pet peeves. Everytime I see "alright" used in a work of fiction published by a major publishing house, I want to scream and wail. It's not a word.
And, the use of "Negro" and, even worse, "Negress." Nails on a chalkboard. I get this is a book set beginning in 1901 and ending sometime just before the second World War. I get it. It's historical, and the English in the islands probably did refer to black people that way. I read a lot of historical fiction, and I am not someone who insists that my historical fiction be sanitized to the political correctness standards of 2018. Yes, racism among the English colonists in the West Indies probably was rampant. Using that word clearly demonstrated just how racist these people were. But, really. These were people. Saying "Negress" was making a woman into an animal, like "lioness." I guess once or twice might have been enough to convey the racism in that society, but there was not one single reference to people of African heritage using any word other than "Negro" or "Negress." It was overkill. I cringed every time I read it. Took me out of the story.
And with all of these writing issues, there was so much taking me out of the story, that I wasn't in the story at all! Which brings me to the main problem: characterization. I edit fiction, and writers' workshops are always emphasizing, "show, don't tell." Phillips does nothing but tell. Sorry, to me it's not "literary;" it's just bad writing! Plain and simple. Telling, not showing, meant the characters were flat and two-dimensional. Even Gwen. And since Gwen was clearly a woman who struggled with depression, low self-esteem, and alcoholism, it was a painful read. Because of the poor writing choices separating me from her, I couldn't care enough about her to want to devote the time to share her journey and endure her depression and try to understand or empathize. Instead...it was just boring and depressing. Since I wasn't "in her head," there was no real understanding of why she did what she did. She just drifted along.
All in all, a painful read. Had it not been that this was a book club book, I would never have gotten past a hundred pages. I will never read anything else by this author.
December 1, 2018
Gwendolen watches her husband open a letter and frown slightly at it. When he breaks the news to her she finds out that he has received an unexpected inheritance. He offers to pay for them both to head back to her home of Dominica that she left as a small girl. Her brief childhood there still inhabits her memories, but it was a place of beauty and freedom. It is a place far removed from the grey days and lonely nights of living in England.
This trip home causes her to look back on her life spent far away from home, the steep learning curve of being in an English school, how her background closed so many doors and the moments spent with those looking to take advantage of her. Her visit to the home she left stirs memories that have long been suppressed and makes her consider where her future may lead.
This is a fictionalised account of Gwen Williams, who is better known as Jean Rhys, author of Wide Sargasso Sea. I have not read that book yet so knew nothing of her story. There were parts of Phillips' story that I liked, in particular, the time she spent in Dominica as a child and when she returned at the end of the book. However, there were parts in the middle that really struggled to catch my interest. Not bad overall, but didn't feel it excelled, I would give another of his books a go at some point.
This trip home causes her to look back on her life spent far away from home, the steep learning curve of being in an English school, how her background closed so many doors and the moments spent with those looking to take advantage of her. Her visit to the home she left stirs memories that have long been suppressed and makes her consider where her future may lead.
This is a fictionalised account of Gwen Williams, who is better known as Jean Rhys, author of Wide Sargasso Sea. I have not read that book yet so knew nothing of her story. There were parts of Phillips' story that I liked, in particular, the time she spent in Dominica as a child and when she returned at the end of the book. However, there were parts in the middle that really struggled to catch my interest. Not bad overall, but didn't feel it excelled, I would give another of his books a go at some point.
March 2, 2019
Disappointed by this book, probably because I had unrealistic expectations. But I think I would have disliked it even more if I had not known that it was supposed to be a fictional biography of Jean Rhys. I knew the basics of her life so I knew the mood was going to be bleak but I just felt no emotional connection to any of the characters. I suspect the author was trying to convey the numbness of her existence but I guess it was a little too numb for me, like she was a passive dead woman walking.... Perhaps that really was how she felt but it seems to me that someone who could write the way she did had to have some greater depth....
I guess I'll have to find her unfinished autobiography and see if she did a better job in expressing herself....
I guess I'll have to find her unfinished autobiography and see if she did a better job in expressing herself....
unfinished
April 25, 2019I read the first chapter and skimmed another two. I’m afraid this is utterly lifeless writing; informative but not at all inviting.
August 23, 2019
Massively depressing
June 17, 2018
I slogged through this one and not always happily I might add. This is a sullen read with not many bright spots although the prose is arousing enough too carry you through. Apparently, according to the book’s blurb this is a fictionalized telling of the true life story of writer Jean Rhys who is famous for the book, Wide Sargasso Sea. In this fictionalization the reader would never know of this connection as the links are not readily revealed in these pages. Gwennie is the center of the novel and the perspective of this book is all hers. She leaves her Caribbean island home of Dominica and arrives in England at thirteen years of age to live under the care of her Aunt Clarice.
Doesn’t take Gwennie long to realize she can never be English enough for the English and this realization is of great distress to her throughout her life and leads to a couple of bad marriages and a constant longing for home but not in a loving way that is clearly displayed in the work. The longing seems more out of curiosity and sense of missing home. The novel starts with Gwennie and her husband preparing for a trip back to Dominica and circles back and forth between present and recent past requiring attention of the reader.
Although Gwennie is a likable enough character, I never made a full investment in her due to the sometimes foggy descriptions of time, place and incidents. It’s a novel that you at once understand the writer took great care in crafting and you recognize the brightness and talent of such a task, but something is leaving you cold, unsatisfied. I’m not suggesting you not read this one, if you are a fan of Jean Rhys, I suspect it would hold a higher joy for you. If you love impressive prose than it doesn’t get much better than Caryl Phillips. A three star rating says it is average but the joy of the writing perhaps adds another half star. Thanks to Farrar Straus&Giroux and Netgalley for an advance DRC. Book was published in May and is available wherever books are sold.
Doesn’t take Gwennie long to realize she can never be English enough for the English and this realization is of great distress to her throughout her life and leads to a couple of bad marriages and a constant longing for home but not in a loving way that is clearly displayed in the work. The longing seems more out of curiosity and sense of missing home. The novel starts with Gwennie and her husband preparing for a trip back to Dominica and circles back and forth between present and recent past requiring attention of the reader.
Although Gwennie is a likable enough character, I never made a full investment in her due to the sometimes foggy descriptions of time, place and incidents. It’s a novel that you at once understand the writer took great care in crafting and you recognize the brightness and talent of such a task, but something is leaving you cold, unsatisfied. I’m not suggesting you not read this one, if you are a fan of Jean Rhys, I suspect it would hold a higher joy for you. If you love impressive prose than it doesn’t get much better than Caryl Phillips. A three star rating says it is average but the joy of the writing perhaps adds another half star. Thanks to Farrar Straus&Giroux and Netgalley for an advance DRC. Book was published in May and is available wherever books are sold.
May 26, 2018
Colorful though dour. Full review to come at memphisflyer.com.
August 14, 2018
This book is disappointing if you want to read about the writer Jean Rhys, but interesting if you want to learn about the woman who eventually becomes writer Jean Rhys. It follows the life of Gwendolyn Williams, her defiant youth in Dominca, her banishment to an English boarding school, her transitory life as showgirl/mistress/wife, and her many broken relationships along the way. Williams is a misfit wherever she goes. It ends with a disheartening voyage home to the West Indies with her second husband in the 1930s to discover she no longer belongs there, either. It would be another 30 years before she wrote her subversive novel Wide Sargasso Sea.
The narrative has a disjointed, lurching quality, which I think captures Williams's own transient experience of the world, her ongoing alienation from her family, peers, countrymen. Nothing is solid or sure; nothing endures. I didn't love this book, but I was intrigued by what it was doing. Phillips is showing the formation of the writer, as well as the ways growing up a colonial who disliked colonizers shaped Williams, and made her an outsider and critic of the English empire.
The narrative has a disjointed, lurching quality, which I think captures Williams's own transient experience of the world, her ongoing alienation from her family, peers, countrymen. Nothing is solid or sure; nothing endures. I didn't love this book, but I was intrigued by what it was doing. Phillips is showing the formation of the writer, as well as the ways growing up a colonial who disliked colonizers shaped Williams, and made her an outsider and critic of the English empire.
February 9, 2024
This is a fictionalized look at the life of the author Jean Rhys. Born in the British West Indies and then educated in Britain, her life was a series of affairs and marriages throughout Europe in the 1920-40s.
I saw hints of exploration into the power dynamics of colonies and their rulers, men and women, parents and children, servants and their wealthy employers. However, these themes were not well explored and the book was a tedious journey through the life of a woman who didn’t seem to care about anyone or any thing.
I saw hints of exploration into the power dynamics of colonies and their rulers, men and women, parents and children, servants and their wealthy employers. However, these themes were not well explored and the book was a tedious journey through the life of a woman who didn’t seem to care about anyone or any thing.
August 13, 2025
Was disappointed with this novel. It is about a woman called Gwendoline who grows up in the West Indies and emigrates to London and ends up studying drama. So to me sounding promising.
However the story is told in the third person and is very flat with no emotion what so ever. The chapters are each incidents in her life, that together tell the story but there's nothing linking them and filling in the bits in the middle.
After I'd read it, I learnt that it was based on the life of Jean Rhys (an author that I have never heard of), and wonder if a biography might have worked better.
However the story is told in the third person and is very flat with no emotion what so ever. The chapters are each incidents in her life, that together tell the story but there's nothing linking them and filling in the bits in the middle.
After I'd read it, I learnt that it was based on the life of Jean Rhys (an author that I have never heard of), and wonder if a biography might have worked better.
June 8, 2019
3.75? I don’t usually care for this genre (fictional biography of real people) but this one was mostly well done and believable, especially if you know Jean Rhys and/or are familiar with her novels. Felt a bit like a ‘spot-the-allusion’ at times, but still well written, if mostly plotless.
December 31, 2018
Thoughts coming shortly
April 30, 2019
Phillips is a lovely writer, but why write a fictionalized biography when you have no empathy for your subject? Did he get an advance on the project and feel compelled to carry through, regardless?
February 9, 2019
Jean Rhys, author of Wide Sargasso Sea, whose life is fictionalized here, was born in Dominica to a Welsh father and an English mother. Her father was a doctor, and her mother a socialite. From an early age Jean (or Gwen, as she is called in this book) watches everything around her, wondering, observing, judging. As a teenager, she goes to boarding school in England, where she is deeply unhappy until she discovers her talent for the stage; her early encounters with men and eventual marriage to a man who is so different from her, seem only to increase her sense of alienation from the world. Her miserable drinking is often out of control. In her forties she at last comes home to her birthplace, and in a perplexing sequence, realizes she does not fit in here either; so disgusted with the treatment of the people by the British landowners, and the conquests of the Empire. This is a strangely aloof novel, rarely referring to Gwen by name; the reader floats along with Gwen from event to event, unpinned by details like dates. The book finishes with possibly the best final sentence ever. Adult.
May 23, 2018
Caryl Phillips is a Caribbean-born British writer now living in New York, so it's easy to guess why he might relate to Jean Rhys, who grew up in colonial Dominica in the early twentieth century. In this biographical novel, she is known by her real name of Gwendolen Williams. It's a little disappointing that her writing is barely mentioned, but then her life and her art were closely intertwined. The opening chapters, which describe her childhood in Dominica and subsequent banishment, and the closing chapters which describe her return, were for me the most beautiful parts of the book. The middle section, which covers her many lovers and desparate existence in Paris and London, was less revealing, perhaps because Rhys captured it so well in her own stories. However, Phillips evokes the sadness of a woman torn between two cultures with poignancy, and also her innate waywardness which some critics have mistaken for passivity.
December 28, 2018
A disembodied series of vignettes about the life of writer Jean Rhys. The tone is somber, the milieus are mostly overcast and dreary, the characters drink too much and abuse their powers, but, despite its melancholy, the book depicts the decline of Britain's influence on the world quite well, using Rhys as the paragon and principal observer. She is forever in limbo, a Caribbean-born Englishwoman at the whim of family decisions and moody lovers. Phillips has extended the meta-analysis that Rhys herself made famous through her depiction of Jane Eyre's madwoman in the attic in Wide Sargasso Sea. In that text, we saw the origins of character; in Phillips' work, we understand the origins of author. The novel reads quickly and requires flexibility to better apprehend the loose assemblage of characters and events, but it's a successful rendering, an evocation of place and mood rather than a work of authentic biography.
June 26, 2018
When I first learned of Phillips' latest novel, I was excited because of the historical figure centering his narrative which is the Dominican novelist Jean Rhys (Gwendolyn). In reading the cover summary of the novel, Phillips focuses on Gwendolyn's personal challenges as an adolescence in Dominica and later years living in England and Paris, and subsequent return to Dominica. The narrative captures the interior life of Gwendolyn as she both interacts and emotionally distances herself away from family, adult authority figures, friends, and husbands. Phillips' interior exploration of Gwendolyn's life is driven through detail and less on dialogue. I was hoping to gain some insight into Gwendolyn's emergence as a writer and more in depth coverage of her voice. Even though Phillips doesn't attempt to create a narrative biography of Rhys, I sense that he wanted to get to the intimate details of her emotional life. Upon finishing the novel, I didn't have a sense of hope for Gwendolyn to thrive upon her return to England. Jean Rhys has been deemed as a tragic figure in the media and scholarship due to her hardships with substance abuse, poverty, and volatile personal relationships but I think that there are possible redeeming qualities that can be reclaimed from her life. She used some of her hardships as material for her fictional writings. Her novel, Wide Sargasso Sea, was well-crafting and compelling in subject matter. Rhys draws from her life in Dominica and England to explore the life of a mulatto woman. I admire Phillips' writing craft and interest in capturing aspects of Rhys' life.
July 12, 2018
And a bitter one at that. I went for this on the basis of a good NYT review by William Boyd, who has written some late/postcolonial novels set in Africa that I liked very much. This starts out in the late 19th century on the British-ruled Caribbean island of Dominica, where the young daughter of the colony medical officer thrives in the sun-filled island life but is indifferent to the prevailing social conventions of her parents’ class. As a teen, she is sent to England in the care of an uncaring aunt for improvement of her headstrong, sometimes wayward behaviors, and later, alone and out of place in the presumed mother culture, her life over the 1910s and WWI and ‘20s years dissolves in booze, beaus, and two bad marriages in an unremittingly gray (never sun, always rain) existence that even a hoped-for later-in-life return to Dominica cannot redeem. The story is based on the life of Dominica-born British writer Jean Rhys and full of good and perceptive writing of a traditional British sort from a nontraditional—black, Caribbean—writer.
September 3, 2018
I'm not quite sure what to think of this book, a novel based on the life of Jean Rhys. It is reported to parallel the decline of the British Empire, and all that it touched and tarnished. Gwendolyn, the main character, castaway from her proper British mother, and disillusioned physician father, is sent to London, to Aunt Clarice, a pinion holding the realm together. The rest of the novel, has the fledgling, Gwennie, speechless, facing a world that seems to reject her. We are given the impression that she is of mixed blood, although beautiful, somehow too native to be accepted by society, who thinks itself pure, Victoria's legitimate children, possibility. I found myself bidding her, pleading with her, to speak, to say what her mind tells her. The question remains, are we all, hundreds of years from our revolution, still trying to break free of the heritage, the hierarchy of the pretense, the desire for pure royal blood?
October 1, 2018
Through 65 very short chapters we get glimpses into the life of Gwen Williams AKA Jean Rhys, the author of Wide Sargasso Sea (though that name or her writing of that book are not specifically mentioned here). I say glimpses, we get descriptions of what has happened, but much of the ‘action’ takes place outside of these scenes and Gwen rarely speaks directly to anyone and seems strangely absent throughout her story. We get great swathes of direct speech from others, particularly in the longer middle chapters where one of her (many) lovers from one of her (many and unremittingly unhappy) relationships recounts his tedious youth. Caryl Phillips is such a thorough writer that you know this novel has been painstakingly constructed to make you feel a certain way - alienated, miserable, unwanted? - but none of that makes it an engaging read. Perhaps Gwen never understood herself so is unable to enlighten us? Perhaps she really was just an awful person. Either way, I found it quite hard work.
October 6, 2018
I have eight books written by Jean Rhys on my bookshelf including Smile Please which features a photograph of her on the cover as a young woman and then one on the back as a lovely older woman. She is so fascinating in both. I read these 35 or so years ago and loved them all. So, I was thrilled to come across this novel which offers C. Phillips take on her life. This is a sad story. Heartbreaking even. The writing moves along at a even pace, rather languidly. Each event chips away at was once a high spirited mischievous child culminating in a lonely alcoholic completely misunderstood at every turn. Her exile to England from her beloved West Indian island of sun and color fills her with cold, rain, and indifference. Anomie indeed. The ending is stark. Phillips did an exquisite job of providing the reader with an unrelenting examination of life at that time for a female. Sleep it off dear lady.
July 14, 2018
I very much enjoyed this fictional recreation of the life of Jean Rhys. It’s necessarily fairly speculative, although clearly thoroughly researched, focussing largely on the earlier parts of her life and in particular the trip she made back to visit her home on Domenica, a trip she didn’t document. Although the book largely ignores her writing life, nevertheless I felt it presents the reader with an evocative and compelling portrait of this most troubled of writers. True to the facts as far as they are known, Phillips has also remained true to the spirit of her life and for me it felt authentic and convincing. We nevertheless don’t really get to know Rhys, and she remains enigmatic, a sad and essentially lonely character. Phillips deals expertly with his themes of exile, displacement, loss and alienation and the novel is a heart-felt portrayal of the migrant experience. Recommended.
December 17, 2018
Mr. Phillips is an excellent writer. I did not realize this is a somewhat biographical fictionalized account of a real person until I read other reviews upon completion. Mr. Phillips writes well about dislocation and how colonization has affected both the colonial peoples and the colonizers. The story of Gwen who grew up on the island of Dominica to a mother whose people had a plantation there and her father an expat Welsh doctor who made Dominica his home. The expats never feel quite "good enough" as compared to English society in England. Gwen is shipped off the England where she spends her adult life yearning for a home that becomes a chimera more than a real place. I found this quite an engaging work even though Gwen is not a likable character. Mr.Phillips is an author that I read as soon as I find a book by him.
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