Jean Rhys

There isn’t an adjective more appropriate than “haunted” to describe the deeply troubled, self-lacerating, and finally (to a degree) triumphant life of the Caribbean-born Jean Rhys. As presented by Miranda Seymour in I Used to Live Here Once [Norton], her richly detailed, exhaustively researched, and warmly sympathetic new biography, Rhys appears to have been haunted by memories of her girlhood on the small, largely impoverished island of Dominica, then a British colony. Joyce Carol Oates, The New York Review