Carole Angier

Edgar Reitz’s Heimat is not just a brilliant film about Germany. It is a brilliant film about our time, anywhere – perhaps about any time anywhere. The war between continuity and change, staying at home and leaving home, is part of the human condition. This war is the true subject of Reitz’s huge and absorbing masterpiece. It begins in 1919, when Europe has destroyed itself and the future is moving to the new world, America. The old world, essentially unchanged for centuries, has just died, and Heimat is an elegy for a way of life which no one has properly valued until it was over.’

Jean Rhys always said, and certainly believed, that she didn’t want to be a writer. She only wrote, she said, because she was unhappy, and when she was happy, as she was in her twenty years of marriage to her third husband, she didn’t write at all. Now comes this extraordinary book to prove that this simply wasn’t true. Jean was only half-like one of her heroines: passive, incompetent, decoratively doomed. Her letters show that she was a dedicated professional writer; that her third marriage covered some of the hardest years of her life; and that throughout it she never stopped writing, or trying desperately to write.