The novelist Rebecca West wrote of Rhys's work: 'If one is not entirely free from misery when one opens the book one will be at the suicide point long before one closes it.

Rhys's four early novels were well reviewed, but commercial failures. I don't believe the genius and the addiction come together, or that they need each other to exist, although I am certain that Rhys believed it did, and Winehouse seems to agree. This is typical addict thinking - I have made a masterpiece - and I will break it, so you can see my worthlessness. When Winehouse wins five Grammy awards she lies in the gutter, for the world to see. When Rhys wrote the first draft of her masterpiece, Wide Sargasso Sea, she burned it, so she could say it was gone. But alcoholics and drug addicts are smelted insane - I believe they are born self-hating, and look everywhere for agreement. This is insane to the healthy mind this is why we stare at Winehouse. Pizzichini wrote of the end of Rhys's first love affair: 'She began her pursuit of disappointing adventures and loves that replicated this scenario of loss and mortification or else retreated, disconsolate and speechless, alone with the chaos her feelings brought.' I think Winehouse does this too - she chooses men who will help her destroy herself, and then blames them for the hurt. They sit alone in hotel rooms, looking for men to abuse them and drinking themselves into oblivion. She writes about women who dedicate themselves to the manufacture of agony, and who seek out situations of pain to feed on. Her early books are about herself - she draws the mental template of the embryonic alcoholic. She left for England at 17, and became a chorus girl she barely saw her family again. She was born in 1890 in Dominica, in the West Indies, the daughter of a Welsh doctor. She takes me into the isolated room, and I just want to drink with her. I am an alcoholic writer with seven years of abstinence but, when I read Jean Rhys, I want to drink. 'I only ever write about my life,' she said, and, with a bottle in one hand, and a pencil in the other, she drew the most evocative self-portrait of an insane female writer in print. She was helpless she wanted to destroy herself and she did, and between the blackouts and the chaos, the occasional novel leaked out.

Her life was an opera of violence and self-destruction. Lilian Pizzichini has written a portrait of Jean Rhys - the patron saint of alcoholic writers. Why does she seem to want to kill herself with drugs? Is the source of her pain the source of her genius? We seem to have been asking these questions for years, as she disintegrates yet further, live on Sky News.īut a superb new book has just come out that provides clues. A my Winehouse turns her black, bewildered eyes towards the cameras and we too are bewildered.

Jean rhys sargasso sea