[Jean Rhys's life is] a terrible story but an uncommon one in our century, which is more notable for the falls from glory that follow on a too eager appreciation of writers than for the neglect of talent, and it makes the publication of Miss Rhys's autobiography ["Smile Please"] an event of more than ordinary interest. What about this survivor? Who was the woman who wrote those remarkable novels in the first place? For remarkable they were and are—lean, hard, as frightening as they are exact in their quiet statement of emotional desolation.
But more than curiosity about the personal history of so gifted an author, legitimate as that is, is involved in our interest in the life of Jean Rhys. Miss Rhys is an obsessed writer whose novels move scarcely at all beyond their central characters—all of them, despite their altered names, the same woman at different stages of experience—or their theme of female victimization. We now have it in Jean Rhys's own words—"People have always been shadows to me…. I have never known other people. I have only ever written about myself"—but it was never difficult to guess that she was herself the subject (or is it the object?) of her fiction. There was the possibility and hope that her memoir might help us understand the mysterious process by which she transformed such an extreme of self-absorption into her lovely art.
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