Jean Rhys (1890 1979) is best known for her 1966 novel Wide Sargasso Sea. A prequel to Jane Eyre, Rhys s revolutionary work reimagined the story of Bertha Rochester the misunderstood madwoman in the attic who was driven to insanity by cruelties beyond her control. The Blue Hour performs a similar exhumation of Rhys s life, which was haunted by demons from within and without. Its examination of Rhys s pain and loss charts her desperate journey from the jungles of Dominica to a British boarding school, and then into an adult life scarred by three failed marriages, the deaths of her two children, and her long battle with alcoholism. A mesmerizing evocation of a fragile and brilliant mind, The Blue Hour explores the crucial element that ultimately spared Rhys from the fate of her most famous protagonist: a genius that rescued her, again and again, from the abyss.