Half-wild Lyra from Northern Lights was the first female character who felt real to Jane Gleeson-White. Then she met Elena Ferrante’s ‘ferocious, filthy, quicksilver’ Lila, a more complex version.
A new biography of Jean Rhys, the Dominican-born author of Wide Sargasso Sea, pays close attention to her origins – but stops short of examining the colonial relations central to her story.
