Jean Rhys was born Ella Gwendoline Rees Williams in Dominica, the daughter of William Williams, a Welsh physician, and Minna, née Lockhart, a white Creole of Scottish descent. Educated at a Catholic convent, she was deeply influenced by her experiences of exploring the wild, isolated estate of the sugar plantation which had belonged to her great-grandfather.

A spell at the Perse School, Cambridge, taught her that she would never really belong in cold, grey England, and she retained her Caribbean accent, despite numerous elocution lessons while studying at the Academy of Dramatic Art in London. ‘Jean Rhys’ was one of several stage names she used during her early career as a chorus girl, and she later adopted it as her nom de plume. This stage of her life inspired her third novel, Voyage in the Dark (1934).

In 1919 Rhys married Dutch journalist Jean Lenglet and moved with him to Paris. After featuring a short story of hers in The Transatlantic Review in 1924, the writer Ford Madox Ford published her first collection of short stories, The Left Bank (1927). He recognised the powerful combination of her colonial perspective with her distinctive ‘stream of consciousness’ technique. Rhys’s affair with Ford, and the breakdown of her marriage, provided the material for her first novel, Quartet (1928), which was first published under the title Postures.

A return to London in 1928 led to Rhys living with her literary agent Leslie Tilden Smith, whom she married in 1934. Her next three novels, After Leaving Mr Mackenzie (1930), Voyage in the Dark (1934) and Good Morning Midnight (1939), drew on her experience of displacement, poverty and sexual dependence in Paris and London.

Paultons House

From 1936 to 1938, Rhys and Tilden Smith made their home at Flat 22 in Paultons House, a large block of flats that had been built in 1935. It was here that Rhys wrote Good Morning, Midnight, not at her desk, but in the mornings while still in bed, which was ‘strewn with pages’.

After Tilden Smith’s death in 1945 she married for a third time, and in 1960 moved to Devon, settling in the village of Cheriton Fitzpaine. While living there she wrote Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), her response to Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre. It was this novel, which portrays the first Mrs Rochester’s Caribbean childhood, that brought her fame, and it has remained a mainstay of the 20th-century literary canon ever since.