In Rhys's autobiographical fragment [Smile Please], as in her fiction, life is outside, an indefinable and elusive otherness. Whether she longs to lose herself in a man, a place or an event, the woman can only put herself in the way of it, waiting for it to brush past and leave her even emptier of herself than before.

Smile Please shows that Rhys's passion for loss came from the beauty and corruption of the island of Dominica, where the whites died young or went mad or drunk from the illegible intensities of a paradise which wasn't theirs…. In Smile Please, Rhys admits she wanted to be black, to be free from repressive white history, but eventually she came to hate the blacks for taking back the island which was the vessel holding her past. After such a vivid, poisoned youth, Rhys could never be a native anywhere…. (pp...