Darling of the demi-monde

She drank, she bit people, she went to prison. But Jean Rhys was also a very fine novelist, says Suzi Feay. And now her life has been brought to the stage

Jean Rhys is one of those rare writers who survive premature burial. In the middle of her life, she was widely assumed to be dead by literary friends who had lost sight of her for years. In 1949, when Rhys was in her late fifties, an actress, Selma Vaz Dias, wanted to turn Good Morning, Midnight, one of her most celebrated novels, into a radio play. Enquiries proved vain: "Jean Rhys" was a pseudonym and the writer had married again. Fortunately, the author saw the last-ditch advertisement Vaz Dias placed in the New Statesman. Ella Gwendolen Hamer, as she was then known, was living untranquilly in south London, and her exploits under that name were regularly reported in local papers.

Rhys – Mrs Hamer – was a belligerent drunk, despised by her neighbours. They, in turn, represented what she most hated and feared: English respectability. She appeared in court, shouting and protesting, nine times over two years for harassment and public disorder. It was all part of a long, sad struggle against the forces of convention. The English, Rhys complained, loved to be shocked, positively wanted to be shocked: "But when you shock them – how shocked they are!"

In a final, savage twist, when Vaz Dias made contact and attempted to get the radio play off the ground (it was not broadcast until 1957), the neighbour who had felt the brunt of Rhys's anger spread the story that the madwoman next door was now "impersonating a dead author called Jean Rhys". "It's a weird feeling being told you are impersonating yourself," she responded, "you think: perhaps I am."

As a result of her chronic money problems, psychological hang-ups and fervent perfectionism, Jean Rhys's body of work is small. The novels are short, pithy and unsparing. Quartet, After Leaving Mr Mackenzie, Voyage in the Dark, Good Morning Midnight and her rebuke to Jane Eyre, Wide Sargasso Sea, all draw on her experiences in the West Indies (where she was born to a Creole mother and Welsh father), Paris and England. There are also two fine collections of short stories, a form she worked at all her life, and a posthumous autobiographical work, Smile Please. You could read it all comfortably in under a fortnight. But this writer, so nearly forgotten in her own lifetime, gets stranger and stronger in her literary afterlife, rather like the soucriant, the Caribbean female vampire who turns up in her stories.

Rhys's bitter vision of seedy boarding houses, threadbare morality, borderline prostitution and alcoholic despair will always attract connoisseurs of the demi-monde, and the books' links with her own life – as kept woman, mannequin, showgirl – continue to fascinate. But it seems that her reputation is enjoying a special renaissance right now. Lilian Pizzichini, the award-winning author of Dead Men's Wages, is working on a new biography, The Blue Hour, so named for Rhys's favourite perfume, L'Heure Bleue by Guerlain, and for the twilight hour when she usually got drunk. First-time author Ruth Webb is also writing a Rhys biography for Virago. And currently on tour – arriving in London next week – is the play After Mrs Rochester, written by Polly Teale, and starring Diana Quick as Rhys, battling her demons and about to begin her masterpiece.

Teale came across Rhys when working on a production of Jane Eyre, also for the theatre company Shared Experience. She read Wide Sargasso Sea for background, and a brief biographical note in the introduction gripped her: "Even if you just read the bare bones, it is an extraordinary story. What fascinated me were the parallels between her life and that of Bertha Rochester, the 'madwoman in the attic' who became the heroine of Wide Sargasso Sea. They'd both grown up in the West Indies, and both ended up very isolated in the remote English countryside; they both felt like outsiders, were misunderstood and suffered from violent rages. Jean certainly lived life on the edge: she was an alcoholic, she spent time in prison, had lots of relationships but found it difficult to sustain them. There was one detail which I found telling: when Jean was sent to prison it was for attacking someone and biting them. Which is exactly what Bertha Rochester did to people who arrived in her attic unexpectedly. So there were all sorts of parallels, and perhaps, I thought, you could see Bertha Rochester as an alter ego."

There is a rather strange anomaly in the dating of Wide Sargasso Sea, which means that though Rhys's book is clearly intended to be a prequel, the events it describes appear to take place after the close of Jane Eyre. In Charlotte Brontë's novel, St John Rivers gives the governess heroine a copy of Walter Scott's Marmion hot off the press. This dates the action to 1808, and Jane, we're told frequently, is 18. Mr Rochester is 20 years her senior; and Bertha, his first, mad wife whom he keeps in the attic, is five years older than him – one more thing her family lied about. This gives Bertha a birthdate of around 1765. Yet in Wide Sargasso Sea, Antoinette (later renamed Bertha by Mr Rochester in an act of colonial oppression) sews a sampler at school with the date 1839 on it, and Mr Rochester, arriving to woo her, finds copies of Byron and The Confessions of an English Opium Eater in her room. That was published in 1822 – some years after the close of Jane Eyre.

It's a strange mistake for so careful a writer as Rhys, considering that Wide Sargasso Sea was the novel she worked on secretly for years, hoarding it under the bed in carrier bags. It seems Rhys assumed that Jane Eyre took place just before the date it was published, in 1847. This slightly embarrassing discrepancy does serve a creative purpose in Wide Sargasso Sea, however: the "wrong" date locates it that much further down the road to the abolition of slavery which culminated in the Emancipation Act of 1833, mentioned in Rhys's novel. The treatment of this theme, and the subtlety with which she handles the issue of race, has gained new respect for Rhys as an important postcolonial writer. "You could say she has the immigrant mentality," says Pizzichini, "so she speaks to people living on the edge of British society."

One thing she wasn't, though, was a feminist. Diana Quick points out: "She was very difficult with women. I think she always felt rivalrous. She was an old-fashioned gal! Polly's given me a lovely line, which I think must be from a story, where she says: 'Money, great god money, you make possible what's good in life: the envy of women, the love of men, even the luxury of a soul and thoughts of one's own.' The first thing she thinks money represents is to look gorgeous and be the envy of other women." Yet Pizzichini points out: "Jean Rhys was never happy being a woman. That is the state her novels examine."

Her striking looks were central to her life, and therefore to her largely autobiographical novels. As a young woman, Rhys was picked up and as abruptly discarded by a series of sugar daddies, and even in old age, she was inordinately vain (her last words were reported to have been: "Please, my eyeshadow"). "She was essentially a narcissist," maintains Quick. "Her looks were of crucial importance to her. Francis Wyndham said that he thought she was something of a witch, too, in that she was very alluring, that she could attract any man she wanted and definitely had a charismatic power. But I also think she lived that terrible predicament of having very low self-esteem and constantly looking to prove she was worth something in the way she was treated by others, especially men. I think this problem went right back to the Caribbean, and her mother not really valuing her, and her feeling it would be better to have been 'a black nigger than a white nigger'."

It can all look terribly bleak, but Quick insists: "I think she was also very camp! She had a lot of 'walkers' who were young gay men. She loved nothing better than to hear showbiz gossip, and to be made up with greasepaint and to go and meet glamorous people."

And the story has a happy ending – or as happy as Rhys herself would permit. After years of living alone in a tumbledown Devon cottage, drinking and working obsessively on Wide Sargasso Sea, she was rediscovered, yet again, and rescued by a heroic team of writers, editors and friends, among them Wyndham, Diana Athill, and Diana and George Melly, who gave the still very badly behaved old lady a home at the end (she died in 1979, aged 88). Wide Sargasso Sea, recovered and reassembled from its plastic bags, became a prize-winning modern classic on its publication in 1967, and its author was made a CBE. Rhys's response to this adulation? Of course, it had come "too late".

'After Mrs Rochester': Lyric Hammersmith, London W6 (08700 500511), Tuesday to 10 May and touring