Editing Jean Rhys (section)

==Early life==
Rhys's father, William Rees Williams, was a Welsh medical doctor and her mother, Minna Williams, née Lockhart, a third-generation Dominican [[Creole peoples#Caribbean|Creole]] of Scots ancestry.{{cn|date=August 2024}} ("Creole" was broadly used in those times to refer to any person born on the island, whether they were of European or African descent, or both.) She had a brother. Her mother's family had an estate, a former plantation, on the island.{{cn|date=August 2024}}

Rhys was educated in Dominica until the age of 16, when she was sent to England to live with an aunt, as her relations with her mother were difficult. She attended the [[Perse School for Girls]] in [[Cambridge]],<ref name="carr"/> where she was mocked as an outsider and for her accent. She attended two terms at the [[Royal Academy of Dramatic Art]] in London by 1909. Her instructors despaired of her ever learning to speak "proper English" and advised her father to take her away. Unable to train as an actress and refusing to return to the Caribbean as her parents wished, Rhys worked with varied success as a [[chorus girl]], adopting the names Vivienne, Emma, or Ella Gray. She toured Britain's small towns and returned to [[rooming house|rooming]] or [[boarding house]]s in rundown neighbourhoods of London.<ref name="carr">Carr, Helen (2004). "Williams, Ella Gwendoline Rees (1890–1979)," ''Oxford Dictionary of National Biography,'' Oxford University Press.</ref>

After her father died in 1910, Rhys appears to have experimented with living as an artist's model after she became the mistress of wealthy stockbroker Lancelot Grey Hugh Smith, whose father [[Hugh Colin Smith]] had been [[Governor of the Bank of England]].<ref>{{Cite web |url=https://genealogy.links.org/links-cgi/readged?/home/ben/camilla-genealogy/current+c-smith81059+2-2-0-1-0|title=Lancelot Grey Hugh SMITH |website=genealogy.links.org |access-date=14 March 2020}}</ref> Though a bachelor, Smith did not offer to marry Rhys, and their affair soon ended. However, he continued to be an occasional source of financial help. Distraught by events, including a near-fatal [[abortion]], Rhys began writing sketches and short stories.

During the [[World War I|First World War]], Rhys served as a volunteer worker in a soldiers' canteen. In 1918, she worked in a pension office to help the families of dead or wounded soldiers and sailors.{{cn|date=August 2024}}