The Blue Hour

A portrait of Jean Rhys, who achieved lasting literary fame with her last novel, The Wide Sargasso Sea. But for Jean it came too late to bring her real happiness. She had experienced too much suffering and emotional turmoil in a life that began on the island of Dominica, and then took in London, Paris, Vienna and Budapest. She was the lover of famous men, spent time as a Gaiety Girl and a prostitute and was married three times. Always feeling an outsider, she was most at home among ‘lowlifes’, the desperate and those on the fringes of society.

• More on the writer Lilian Pizzichini