Jean Rhys was born on the Caribbean island of Dominica in 1890. At age 17, she was forced to move to England, where she became a dancer and travelled widely, but would soon find herself poor and alone, on the brink of prostitution. In the 1930s she lived in Paris. Her first articles appeared in the Trans Atlantic Review, Ford Madox Ford's famous literary magazine, to which such writers as Hemingway and Gertrude Stein also contributed.

In this period, she published four novels: Voyage in the dark, Goodmorning midnight, Quartet, and After leaving Mr Mackenzie, in which she wrote candidly about sexuality, abortion, failed relationships, alcoholism and loneliness. After World War II, Jean Rhys sank into oblivion. It was rumoured that she was dead, but she was in fact living sequestered in a small village in Devon. She worked intermittently there on a novel about Dominica, her childhood paradise. Wide Sargasso Sea was published in 1966 after a thirty-year silence. It was recognised as Rhys' masterpiece and received a number of prominent literary awards. 'It's come too late, it should have happened twenty years ago', Jean Rhys said of this success.

Filmmaker Jan Louter and the Dutch writer Jan Brokken were fascinated by Jean Rhys' mysterious life and by the world described in Wide Sargasso Sea. Following Rhys' tracks in Dominica and Britain, the film shows how the lost paradise of her youth became an obsession. England embodied Rhys' loneliness, hate and fear, sharply contrasting with the Dominican paradise of her imagination.

'Too much blue, too much purple, too much green, the flowers too red, the mountains too high, the hills too near. And the woman is a stranger', Jean Rhys wrote about her island. Two intriguing and ominous sentences about an island where nature's exhuberance was terrifying that are echoed in the documentary.