The Biographers’ Club is delighted to welcome Miranda Seymour, one of the foremost biographers of our time, to discuss her life of Jean Rhys, author of The Wide Sargasso Sea. Seymour will be in conversation with Rachel Cooke, journalist and author of Her Brilliant Career, shortlisted for the Slightly Foxed Best First Biography Prize.
An obsessive and troubled genius, Jean Rhys is one of the most compelling and unnerving writers of the 20th century. Memories of a conflicted Caribbean childhood haunt the four fictions that Rhys wrote during her extraordinary years as an exile in 1920s Paris and later in England. Rhys’s experiences of heartbreak, poverty, notoriety, breakdowns and even imprisonment all became grist for her writing, forming an iconic ‘Rhys woman’ whose personality – vulnerable, witty, watchful and angry – was often mistaken, and still is, for a self-portrait.
Writing in the Observer, Rachel Cooke praised a “slylycompelling” biography: “Half its cast are half crazy, and most of the rest are as creepy as hell. Liars and fraudsters, bigamists and bolters, grifters and gropers: they’re all here, though Seymour has a special line (because her subject attracted them) in the kind of literary stalker whose pulse races furtively at the sight of an old woman with a bad wig, a whisky habit and (just perhaps) a half-finished manuscript in a drawer.”
Do join us for what promises to be an entertaining and revelatory evening.
Venue: Maggs Bros, 48 Bedford Square, WC1B 3DR
Time and date: 6.15pm for 6.30 to 8pm, Wednesday 28 September
£12.50 for a glass (or two) of wine
Please book with [email protected]. We welcome payments by bank transfer if possible – details available on request.