“The writing took so long, in part, because Rhys was a perfectionist who reworked the novel over and over until it met her exacting standards – and also because she was spectacularly inept at managing her day-to-day life and was almost continually derailed from the project. As one of her editors, Diana Athill, wrote, “Her inability to cope with life’s practicalities went beyond anything I ever saw in anyone generally taken to be sane.”
