I, Vera

PRAISE FOR I USED TO LIVE HERE ONCE: ‘This is a first-class life and a rollicking read. Seymour skilfully interweaves the autographical stories and novels with the people and fortunes in Rhys’s crazily adventurous life. She’s warmly sympathetic to the young ingénue of 17, and only slightly less so to the old bat of 87. She’s also the only Rhys biographer who travelled to Dominica to see what it was about the island — its colours, smells, conflicted history and voodoo sorcery — that haunted Rhys all her days but fired her imagination. The result is close to a masterpiece’ John Walsh, Sunday Times ‘Her intimate and insightful biography … certainly reads like a novel. [Seymour] is a bewitching writer … gives us Rhys in all her glory’ Laura Freeman, The Times ‘The superb achievement of Miranda Seymour’s painstaking and compassionate new biography is to dispel forever the idea that Rhys was simply a naïve chronicler of her own experiences … in terms of sheer technique, she was a virtuoso’ Spectator ‘[A] slyly compelling new biography of Jean Rhys … The narrative has the tension of a thriller as Rhys struggles to finish Wide Sargasso Sea’ Rachel Cooke, Observer ‘Seymour,a masterful biographer… tells her story with empathy, precision and a keen eye for the telling detail’LA Times, A Book of the Year 2022 ‘An exhaustive, definitive ride around both the idea and the reality of Jean Rhys … Seymour addresses a writer and woman who is at once self-absorbed and thoughtful, sardonic and sensitive’ Siobhán Kane, Irish Times ‘An absolute belter of a biography … don’t read if you are afraid of monsters’ Marina Hyde, Favourite Reads of 2022 ‘A very impressive piece of work. A long and tangled life most authoritatively pieced together. I was completely absorbed’ Michael Frayn, author of Noises Off