This story begins with a powerful literary lion, Ford Madox Ford, loving and mentoring a beautiful, much younger, very gifted woman in the heady literary atmosphere of 1920s Paris. The connection between them did not last but the woman became the writer Jean Rhys. Her literary style was immediately highly praised but, after a collection of short stories and four novels, she sank into obscurity for almost three decades. Then her fifth and last novel catapulted her into literary stardom in her middle seventies. Her timing was perfect. This exquisitely crafted text appealed to readers interested in the exploitation of women, in race and in colonialism, all important issues in the mid-1960s, a time when West Indian immigration to Britain also brought the Caribbean more into the consciousness of the reading public.

It was gradually discovered that the life of the woman behind the writer was also a gripping story. The given name of Jean Rhys was Ella Gwendoline Rees Williams. She was from an elite family in the colonial Caribbean. She went to England to find her future, became an unsuccessful chorus girl, suffered the death of her father, and almost immediately afterwards, she got her heart broken by a rich gentleman and subsequently fell into a period of rackety living before her first marriage. She had strained relationships with most of her original family. Her first child died as a young baby, and she was separated from her second child for long periods of time. She had three husbands, two of whom went to jail for petty fraud, while the other was an unsuccessful literary agent.