Mackenzie, Voyage in the Dark, and Good Morning, Midnight-were met with mixed critical success. The three major novels that Rhys produced during the 1930’s- After Leaving Mr. Ford took her in as both a protégé and mistress, suggesting that she change her name to Jean Rhys, and eventually facilitating the publication of her work, which often dealt with her own experiences of alienation as a woman at the hands of unjust lovers and an exclusionary society. In 1924, in the midst of a tumultuous marriage, Ella Williams made the acquaintance of the acclaimed English novelist Ford Madox Ford. After suffering a near-fatal abortion paid for by a former lover, Williams began to write. She then subsisted in Britain for nearly a decade on small acting roles and chorus girl parts, with brief stints in nude modeling and prostitution. Williams struggled in her studies with being ostracized for her Caribbean heritage and accent, and eventually was taken out of school because her instructors deemed her unable to rid herself of the West Indies accent that would prevent her from gaining significant stage roles. At sixteen she was sent to England, where she studied to be an actress. Ella Gwendolyn Rees Williams was born in 1890 to a Welsh doctor and a Creole woman of Scots ancestry on the Caribbean island of Dominica, then a British colony.
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