Quartet
(Jean Rhys)
Jean Rhys published five novels in her life, all of them dealing with lost and fragile women struggling to survive off their sexuality. Based on her affair with the writer Ford Madox Ford, Rhys' first novel, Quartet, tells the story of Marya, a young English woman living a bohemian life in 1920's Paris with her husband Stephan, a Pole. Marya is happy - 'Sometimes just the way the light fell would make me unutterably happy' - but when Stephan is arrested she finds herself broke and adrift in the city. It isn't long before the wolves in sheep's clothing arrive in the forms of Hugh Heidler and his wife Lois. Offering Marya friendship and protection, they ensconce her in their flat, but Marya soon finds out that even charity has a price.
A theme in all Jean Rhys' novels is innocence, innocence damaged and fed-upon but never quite achieving the transformation in soul-deadened cynicism. Her novels are tragedies - alcoholism, loneliness, death by violence stalk her heroines like Oedipus's furies - but they are also celebrations of sensitivity. Jean Rhys' heroines really feel. They see the world through sharpened lenses. 'Imitation Louis Quinze chairs, painted screens, three or four elongated dolls, beautifully dressed, with charming and malicious oval faces,' Sasha Jensen thinks in Good Morning, Midnight, recalling the Parisian fashion house where she worked, before describing her subtle, painful humiliation by the manager, the sadistic Mr. Blank. Light on water, veronal dreams, drinking Pernod alone in Montparnasse bars - Jean Rhys evokes them all in language of such beauty and economy that her novels are as fresh as if they had been written yesterday.
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