I USED TO LIVE HERE ONCE - Jean Rhys in Bude

The novelist and writer Jean Rhys made the isolated north Cornwall town of Bude her home in the 1950’s.

Jean was born and had grown up on the Caribbean island of Dominica, her father was a Welsh medical doctor and her mother a third generation Creole, originally of Scots ancestry. Jean left Dominica as a seventeen year old, arriving, in what seemed to her, an intensely dreary and drab England, in1907.

Jean went on to experience some literary success with the publication of four critically acclaimed novels, mostly written while she was living in Paris in the 1930’s, and mostly while living in a menage a trois with Ford Maddox Ford and his long term partner, Australian artist, Stella Bowen. Ford had acted as Jean’s literary mentor and lover. 

However the last of these novels, Good Morning Midnight, came out in 1939 and although now acknowledged as a great work, at the time, it was deemed depressing and had failed to sell well. In the 1940’s Jean returned to England and largely withdrew from public life.

Jean came to live in Bude in 1955, probably at the lowest point in her life. Now sixty five, she was washed up and very much off the literary radar. Indeed rumours circulated that Jean had died. When actress Selma Vaz Dyas hatched the idea of adapting Good Morning Midnight into a monologue for radio, Jean’s publisher advised that Jean Rhys was dead. Selma placed an advertisement in the New Statesman, seeking Jean’s whereabouts. Jean, learning of her alleged demise, wrote with characteristic waspishness; “I don’t know why Constable thought I was dead, it does seem more fitting, I know, but life is never neat and tidy.”

The subsequent relationship with Selma Vaz Dyas saw the start of Jean’s literary rehabilitation and it was while living in Bude that Jean recommenced work on the manuscript which she was calling The First Mrs Rochester and which would eventually become Wide Sargasso Sea, her last and probably best known novel.

Jean and her husband Max lived in rented accommodation at a variety of more or less unsuitable addresses in Bude, from Widemouth, to Upton, to Carteret Road, to Rocket House on Breakwater Road.

She was not happy in Bude and wrote of the discomforts forcibly, most particularly to her daughter. As Francis Wyndham, the literary editor who so patiently nursed Wide Sargasso Sea through its long gestation, described in his introduction to her collected letters, “ever since the end of her first love affair she had been cursed by a kind of spiritual sickness - a feeling of belonging nowhere, of being ill at ease and out of place in her surroundings wherever these happened to be, a stranger in an indifferent, even hostile, world.” I would suggest this alienation went back to Jean’s departure from Dominica as a seventeen year old, and possibly even further too. For the highly colourful, warm and exotic life she so lovingly and vividly recalled from her Caribbean childhood, was also that of an outsider. The once wealthy Lockart family, on her mother’s side, had become less well off and, as former white privileged gentry, they had found themselves, in the years of Jean’s childhood, increasingly, very much in an uncomfortable minority on their island home.

Jean's excoriating emotional honesty contributed to a literary legacy that has now given her the status, for many, as the ultimate outsider and an inspirational voice for the voiceless everywhere. This film chronicles the four significant years Jean lived in Bude and pays tribute to Jean’s unwavering commitment to her craft.