I Used to Live Here Once: The Haunted Life of Jean Rhys
MIRANDA SEYMOUR
(WILLIAM COLLINS, 432 PP, £25)
Tablet bookshop price £22.50 • tel 020 7799 4064

The main purpose of literary biography is to investigate the extent to which the examination of a life can illuminate and enhance the work. No matter how firmly the subject (or others on his or her behalf) may call the insistence on a link crude and reductive, that is what the biographer pursues and what the reader wants. The more admired the work, the more difficult and painful the life, the stronger our curiosity becomes: how, we long to know, do pain and confusion become art?

In undertaking a new biography of Jean Rhys (inset), the accomplished biographer Miranda Seymour has chosen a subject already legendary for her brilliance as a writer and the chaos of her life. By the time she published her masterpiece, Wide Sargasso Sea, in 1966, her name was already synonymous with a certain kind of woman portrayed in her previous books, a vulnerable woman, impoverished and unhappy, who finds herself adrift, aimless, reliant on her looks and sexuality, repeatedly betrayed and maltreated by men. Although Rhys herself denied she was a victim, reading this sympathetic but unsparing account of her life it becomes clear that, to a considerable extent, she was, not least of her own nature.