A very good story and interesting character! I totally enjoyed this novel. And want to know how much is based on fact and how much is fiction. I think more of the former, from what I have now read about Rhys.
Read this from the NPR review:
Caryl Phillips' latest novel, based on the troubled life of the writer Jean Rhys, is a lush exploration of the costs of colonialism, the limited possibilities for non-conformist women, and egregious power imbalances between genders and races. Rhys' life — she was born in the British colony of Dominica in 1890 and sent to school in England at 16 — is a fitting canvas for Phillips' perennial themes of displacement, alienation and muddled identity.
It's easy to understand why Phillips — who was born in St. Kitts, grew up in Leeds, studied at Oxford, teaches at Yale, and lives in New York — is drawn to Rhys, an intriguingly complex, self-destructive individual who spent most of her life in England but felt at home nowhere. A View of the Empire at Sunset is not the first evidence of Rhys' impact on Phillips: His last novel, The Lost Child, painted a nightmarish early childhood for Heathcliff as part of a haunting take on Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights — much as Rhys' Wide Sargasso Sea, her extraordinary response to Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre, imagined a powerful back-story for Rochester's first wife, the madwoman in the attic.
Phillips' view of the empire at sunset is not a pretty one. Social and racial stratifications and resentments cloud the atmosphere. It's no meteorological accident that it is always raining in this novel — and that his characters are rarely equipped with umbrellas. His depiction of chilly, damp England is bleaker and less sympathetic than his view of Rhys; Gwen announces harshly to her second husband, an Englishman, during one of their many quarrels, "Unlike you I have no faith in the civilizing power of the English."
Rhys' travails are painful and increasingly exacerbated by her bad behavior. She's derided for her accent in drama school, trudges through cheap seaside towns as a traveling chorus girl, and is repeatedly forsaken by the wealthy lovers who pay her rent until she becomes too difficult. Her marriages bring scarcely more comfort.
Yet there's beauty aplenty in Phillips' supple, often sensuous prose. Views from train windows of mist-shrouded farmland provide a pronounced contrast with the humid, blazing heat of Dominica, yet both express far more than climate. One example: Phillips' heroine, on her first morning back in Dominica, perches on a rocky outcrop above the harbor, "where she intended to station herself so that, in an hour or two, as the listless waves continued to lap, she might witness the full glory of the sun rising over her now empty world."
