Yseult Bridges

Yseult Bridges (20 April 1888 – 2 April 1971), born Yseult Alice Mary Lechmere Guppy, was a Trinidad and Tobago-born British memoirist, novelist and crime writer best known for memoir Child of the Tropics.

Early life and education Yseult Guppy was born at 26 Queens Park West, in Port of Spain Historian Bridget Brereton describes Alice Guppy was a "domestic tyrant" who was "obsessively critical" of her domestic staff.

Marriage After returning to Trinidad and Tobago, Guppy married Alfred Moore Low, who was later the principal of Queen's Royal College in Port of Spain, in 1906. Guppy and Low had two daughters and divorced in 1928. In 1932 she married Charles Bridges, who worked for the Colonial Service in Nigeria. She also wrote a monograph about the "history, mythology, laws, and customs" of the Yoruba people, but the only copy of it was destroyed during World War II.

Style and themes In the opening note in both of her novels, Bridges informs readers that she is using the term creole "in its true sense" to denote someone "born in the West Indies but of pure EUROPEAN descent" Peake sees this as highlighting a "glaring insecurity" on Bridges' part about the fact that white creoles "may contain an iota of non-European blood" as a consequence of their close associations enslaved Africans and their descendants in the plantation system in the West Indies. He attributes this both to her connection to the "expatriate class", her gender, and her conservatism (relative to her contemporary Trinidadian authors), exacerbated by the fact that she published them under the pseudonym Tristram Hill.