Are the biographers getting any closer? Maybe. In this third major biography, Rhys is treated with more nuance than previously and a clearer separation is made between her and her heroines; the author slips in a reason why this may not be the last biography – 'Writing from pitiless self-knowledge, Jean Rhys addresses the watchful and lonely outsider who lurks within us all. And here, I believe, lies the answer to the enduring power of a novelist whose softly insistent, knowing and sui generis voice speaks with more power to our times even than to her own'; illustrated.
