Under the questionable title of “A Tart’s Life before Jane Eyre,” the London Times has published an excerpt from Lilian Pizzichini new biography of Jean Rhys, The Blue Hour: A portrait of Jean Rhys, to be published by Bloomsbury on May 5. The extract is summarized by the newspaper in the following words: “Jean Rhys wrote Wide Sargasso Sea, the prequel to Jane Eyre, in old age. Lilian Pizzichini, her biographer, reveals how doomed early love and prostitution shaped her work.” It seems on the surface that this is one of those biographies that draws from a writer’s fiction and assumes it’s all biographical, but we will have to see.
You can read the extract at http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/books/book_extracts/article6168266.ece
