Book review: The Blue Hour - A Portrait of Jean Rhys

Published on Friday 29 May 2009 13:08

Lilian Pizzichini Bloomsbury, £18.99 JANET MASLIN

IN THE introduction to her biography of the writer Jean Rhys, Lilian Pizzichini explains the book's title: because L'Heure Bleue by Guerlain was Rhys' favourite perfume and "the blue hour was also the hour when the lap dog she saw herself as being during the day turned into a wolf". Then there is the gloom the colour implies.

Sure enough, this is a biography that accentuates the negative. Handily achieving the level of caricature, it turns Rhys (1890-1979) into a weeping, helpless, passive, shivering, fragile creature who, through some miracle of duality, managed to produce mesmerisingly potent work.

And as a biographical study The Blue Hour has major weaknesses of its own. Vaguely researched, unannotated, barely illustrated, stingy with Rhys' own words and full of heavy-handed paraphrases, it tries to make up in tear-stained empathy what it lacks in depth.

Rhys is the Caribbean-born writer who spent much of her life in Europe, personified the louche life in ways that have guaranteed her an everlasting cult following and stunningly amplified Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre by writing one of the few great books hitched to an existing classic.

That is Wide Sargasso Sea, a novel that envisions the story of the first Mrs Rochester, the one locked in Mr Rochester's attic.

Rhys was a woman who in her later years would bite a constable, throw milk bottles at a fence, toss a brick through the window of the owner of the dog that killed her cat and do a brief stint in prison for assault.

Sexually molested at 12 by a much older man, then relocated to England in her teenage years, Rhys developed and sustained a lifelong sense of dislocation. She would also eternally pine for what she had left behind.

If it does nothing else, The Blue Hour will endear Rhys to a whole new generation of neurasthenic college students, even if Rhys believed that women were most appealing as victims. She once turned from her mirror and offered an appraisal of her doomy mystique that is wiser than anything this biography has to offer: "Found drowned."