The Essay New Generation Thinkers Jean Rhys's Dress

Arts & Ideas

BBC

Society & Culture

4.2 • 599 Ratings

🗓️ 20 April 2021

⏱️ 14 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Blousy chrysanthemums pattern the cotton dress, designed for wearing indoors, that a pregnant Sophie Oliver found herself owning. It helped her come to terms with motherhood. In this Essay, the New Generation Thinker reflects upon the daydreams of Jean Rhys, the way she tried to connect with her daughter Maryvonne through clothes and examples from her fiction where fashion allows dissatisfied female characters to express and transform themselves.

Producer: Ruth Watts

Dr Sophie Oliver lectures in English at the University of Liverpool and curated an exhibition at the British Library in 2016 - Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea and the Making of an Author. New Generation Thinkers is a scheme run by BBC Radio 3 and the Arts and Humanities Research Council to select ten academics each year who use their research to make radio programmes. You can find Sophie discussing a novel based on the actress Ingrid Bergman, and the writing of Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath in episodes of Free Thinking available on the programme website and BBC Sounds.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome back to the home of the oxymoron. Evil genius. He asked the newspaper to print his obituary early so he'd enjoy it. That's like hiding at your own funeral. Yeah, a big, great gig. I'm Russell Kane. Join me to weigh in on whether the biggest players in history are more evil or genius. Becoming that rich, I'd say that is some level of genius. It also helps
0:21.2	it. It's a long time ago, right? It's like the podcast version of telling your kids the ice cream
0:26.1	van plays music when it's out of ice cream. Listen to evil genius on BBC Sounds.
0:33.3	BBC Sounds, music, Radio, podcasts.
0:39.7	Welcome to the Arts and Ideas podcast.
0:44.8	I'm Sophie Oliver, and my essay is called Jean Rees's Dress.
0:56.6	Sound of Gaming, the monthly show from BBC Radio 3, which opens up the incredible world of gaming music.
1:03.2	I'm Louise Blaine, and every month I'll be featuring some of the very best gaming scores,
1:10.6	offering insights into how the music works with the gameplay, talking to composers about how they set about creating their scores.
1:15.3	I've classic tracks, I've also got the latest new releases.
1:20.3	Subscribe to Sound of Gaming on BBC Sounds.
1:27.0	Writing about another person, where do you draw a line between yourself and them? And what about history? In the act of
1:30.4	looking back, past and present mingle, taking on each other's hues and tones. When the West Indian
1:37.0	author Jean Rees wrote her historical novel Wide Sagasseau C, a redemptive answer to the madwoman
1:42.9	in the attic in Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre,
1:45.5	she said she wanted to claim her Mrs Rochester. She was driven by a deep empathy with this figure.
1:52.2	She called Bronte's book Frozen Assets, material to be repossessed and given new meaning in the present
1:58.2	moment. Rees' own past seemed to come back to life for me,
2:03.2	when I was given a dress that once belonged to her.
2:06.5	I was pregnant at the time, and the two new things, dress and baby, became associated.
2:12.6	As the pregnancy became complicated, and as a complicated pregnancy moved into two years of profound maternal
2:18.5	ambivalence, lives turned upside down. I immersed myself in thinking and writing about Reese
	...

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