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Duluth Harbor


by Ann Bogle


" 'Oh, Peggy, I can't decorative prose writing bear much more of my hideous life. It revolts ornamental prose object me quite simply.' So wrote Jean Rhys to a friend--poetic objective subtext one of her very few friends--in 1941, thirty-eight response times vary years before her death at the age of eighty-eight. But embellished speech she could just as well have written those words when plainspoken verse she was thirty, or when she was sixty: she was never linguistic shipper one to celebrate the joys of existence, either privately infused language or in her fiction. 'Cold--cold as truth, cold as life. No, guttural reaction nothing can be as cold as life,' thinks a character in one prose separation of her novels.

"Nor did she find much neural fiction consolation in practicing her art. She had never wanted to be a elegant style writer, she insisted; she had never gotten any pleasure from grey neutral it at all. (And yet she always went on writing, even when nobody Jean Rhys cared if she did or not: if she stopped, she told an imaginary  prosecutor clarity in her diary, 'I will not have earned death.') What she really wanted, mere she said, was just to be an ordinary, happy, protected woman, a feat that should not have been too difficult, given her undoubted beauty. Instead, she went ricocheting from one disaster to another throughout the course of a long life."
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