Preview
  • I Used to Live Here Once

  • The Haunted Life of Jean Rhys
  • By: Miranda Seymour
  • Narrated by: Diana Quick
  • Length: 14 hrs and 9 mins
  • 4.8 out of 5 stars (9 ratings)

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I Used to Live Here Once

By: Miranda Seymour
Narrated by: Diana Quick
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Publisher's summary

An intimate, profoundly moving biography of Jean Rhys, acclaimed author of Wide Sargasso Sea.

Jean Rhys is one of the most compelling writers of the twentieth century. Memories of her Caribbean girlhood haunt the four short and piercingly brilliant novels that Rhys wrote during her extraordinary years as an exile in 1920s Paris and later in England, a body of fiction—above all, the extraordinary Wide Sargasso Sea—that has a passionate following today. And yet her own colorful life, including her early years on the Caribbean island of Dominica, remains too little explored, until now.

In I Used to Live Here Once, Miranda Seymour sheds new light on the artist whose proud and fiercely solitary life profoundly informed her writing. Rhys experienced tragedy and extreme poverty, alcohol and drug dependency, romantic and sexual turmoil, all of which contributed to the "Rhys woman" of her oeuvre. Today, listeners still intuitively relate to her unforgettable characters, vulnerable, watchful, and often alarmingly disaster-prone outsiders; women with a different way of moving through the world. And yet, while her works often contain autobiographical material, Rhys herself was never a victim. The figure who emerges for Seymour is cultured, self-mocking, unpredictable-and shockingly contemporary.

©2022 Miranda Seymour (P)2022 Tantor
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The Brilliant life of Jean Rhys

Miranda Seymour captures Jean Rhys's complex personality, her volatile relationship with men, her struggle as an immigrant and writer like no one else. She does an admirable job in separating the person from the writer, a problem most people have when they read Rhys. Actor Diana Quick's narration is exciting, finely nuanced and riveting. Rhys is not an easy subject to write about, but Seymour makes readers feel like they are int he same room with Rhys.

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