JEAN RHYS’S DREAD of publicity, combined with the mass of correspondence that she evidently destroyed, testifies to her fear of being subjected to a biography. Nevertheless, Tom Staley’s short critical study of her novels, which appeared in the year of Rhys’s death, contained nothing that would have distressed her. As indicated in his 1977 letter to John Byrne, Staley’s book contained only a brief prefatory chapter about the author herself, in which a bare outline of the skimpy known facts of Jean Rhys’s life was provided. Admirers curious to know more about Rhys turned with interest to Smile Please, published in May 1979, the month of her death. Reviews of the memoir were perfunctory; readers felt deprived by the absence of a narrative shape, and disappointed that so little space had been found for a famously reticent author’s experiences after leaving Dominica.
Initially governed by Jean Rhys’s strong desire for privacy, Francis Wyndham would eventually comply with Diana Athill’s wish to permit a young Canadian-born academic, Carole Angier, to deploy her skills as a tenacious researcher to uncover the story of Rhys’s life, combining her independent sleuthing with use of the growing archive now held at Tulsa. Angier’s generous-spirited and invaluably detailed book was published in 1985, alongside a brief, perceptive study of the novels which Angier contributed to the Lives of Modern Women series, edited by Francis Wyndham’s friend Emma Tennant.
First, however, came David Plante. Intimations of what was afoot emerged at a PEN event in January 1980, at which both Jo Batterham and David Plante took the stage before an audience of Rhys’s admirers. Recalling the evening for me in the summer of 2018, Diana Athill was as dismissive of Batterham’s romantic eulogy as of Plante’s shrilly disloyal put-down of his old friend as “a silly, bigoted woman.” Like Athill, Plante recalls the fury with which a protective Harold Pinter verbally attacked him from his seat beside Lady Antonia Fraser in the front row; Batterham, writing to Plante in March, did not hold back. Defending himself, Plante responded that he was only being honest: “Jean would have understood what a writer must do.”1
I’m inclined to agree with Plante. The controversial portrait which he provided in Difficult Women, published in 1983, was no crueller about Rhys than about Plante himself. Today, his book reads as a carefully stylised presentation of partial or imaginative truths shot through with moments of wit, compassion and considerable insight. To Rhys’s supporters, however, the act of betrayal was unforgivable. Rachel Ingalls was not the only former friend who never spoke to David Plante again.
Diana Melly and Francis Wyndham meanwhile embarked upon a selected edition of Rhys’s letters which was published in 1984. Frustratingly truncated because of an absence of almost any correspondence from the first forty years of Rhys’s life, it spans the years 1931 to 1966, ending on the verge of the publication of Wide Sargasso Sea. Equipped with sensitive linking passages and notes contributed by Wyndham, the edited Letters provided many readers with their first introduction to Rhys’s wilful, witty and laceratingly self-aware personality. Reading the letters that she wrote to Wyndham himself—I only wish that we could also read his to her—it’s easy to understand why Francis found Jean Rhys so irresistible.
Wyndham himself approved and admired The Blue Hour (2010), an intuitive and often illuminating short biography of Rhys which was written with passion and empathy by Lilian Pizzichini. Invited to single out the book which she believes best captures her grandmother in the context of her work, Ellen Moerman recommends Genèses d’une folie créole: Jean Rhys et Jane Eyre by Catherine Rovera (Hermann, 2015). A meticulously researched examination of the sources of Rhys’s best-known novel, Rovera’s eloquent study also illuminates the author’s creative processes.
For newcomers to Rhys who want to look beyond the novels, there exists no better introduction than Smile Please. Much of what you have read here is grounded in Rhys’s own artfully circumspect account of her life, starting out when she first faced a camera on her sixth birthday, and ending as her work was about to be seen and judged by Ford Madox Ford. For a biographer, part of the fascination of Smile Please lies in the memoir’s conspicuous absences: within its pages, there’s no mention of Jean Lenglet’s imprisonment; no name for the gentlemanly lover who got Rhys pregnant and broke her heart; no hint that her childhood beau, identified only as “a little boy called Willie,” was the son of Roseau’s leading doctor, Sir Henry Alford Nicholls (an admission which would implicitly have acknowledged the subordinate role of Rhys’s own beloved father).
Against the absences, we can set a quiet store of revelations. Smile Please tells us just how young Rhys was when she first started to write for herself; she was still a child in Dominica when she began keeping “my secret poems exercise book” and wrote plays for home performance. Glancing at her subtle reference to “the Sensitive Plant” that grew wild—as it still does—on the hillside at Geneva, we might almost miss the hint of just who that sensitive plant might represent. There’s even an alluring suggestion of just how closely the memoir and the story “Sleep It Off Lady” became entwined in the ageing Rhys’s thoughts, when she remembers in the memoir that one of the chorus girls in Our Miss Gibbs addressed her as “Verney”: Miss Verney is also the name of the unfortunate “Lady” of the story. “There were supposed to be rats in the dressing-room,” Rhys comments a few lines later in the memoir, “but I never saw one.” Miss Verney, in the story Rhys had plotted out alongside the gestating memoir, suffers from a fixation about an imaginary rat.
Is the intertextual echo simply a slip or one of the author’s literary tricks? Is it an accident that Antoinette Cosway and young Rhys ride a horse that bears the same name: Preston? We can’t be sure. It’s seldom useful or enlightening to attempt to overanalyse Rhys’s fiction. Neither does it help us to compare Rhys to the writers whom she admired and sometimes challenged. Influences abound in her work, but—like Emily Dickinson, in whose wittily broken lines and ghostly shafts of light Rhys may have found the clearest mirror for a mind that looked always into itself—Rhys demands, and deserves, to stand alone. Writing from pitiless self-knowledge, Jean Rhys addresses the watchful and lonely outsider who lurks within us all. And here, I believe, lies the answer to the enduring power of a novelist whose softly insistent, knowing and sui generis voice speaks with more power to our times even than to her own.