14

The Lady Vanishes^* (1950–56)

“Her life was tragic; her courage quite indomitable.”

—Peggy Kirkaldy to Selma Vaz Dias, 4 May 1957

IN THE EARLY spring of 1950, the mortgage company’s repossession of 35 Southend Road left Max and Rhys without a home. The couple had not been entirely friendless in Beckenham: the last to survive of Jean’s cherished trio of cats was hastily bestowed upon a good-natured young neighbour, while another local resident provided temporary storage for her clothes and—crucially—shelf space for a few favourite books. Selling off the majority of her books in order to raise money was a far more painful process for Rhys than it had been to relinquish (for the same purpose) Leslie’s library after his death. Later, she recalled having had to part with the bulk of her cherished French and Russian novels. They fetched almost nothing. Among the handful that she kept back—they included works by Sartre, Beckett, Bernanos, Colette and Céline—was Esther Waters. The calm and stalwart Esther was always Rhys’s touchstone in trying times: in 1953, she would tell one friend that she had read Moore’s novel sixty times.¹

From March 1950 until Max’s trial at the Old Bailey in May, the Hamers rented a single room at a London boarding house in Stanhope Gardens, South Kensington. When Max was not being summoned to meetings by the ever-optimistic and persuasive Michael Donn, the couple wandered like strangers through the unfeeling and stony (as Rhys felt it to be) city. Forlorn and guilt-ridden, Max allowed himself to be dragged by his culture-hungry wife to a film-showing of Jean Cocteau’s Les Parents Terribles and on tours of London’s monuments. Visiting Westminster Cathedral, Rhys fantasised about seeking refuge in a kindly Catholic retreat. “I’m so tired,” she sighed to a sympathetic Peggy Kirkaldy that March.² Drifting through the Victoria and Albert’s echoing galleries, she drew comfort from the archaic smile of a wooden Madonna; it revived happy memories of the Richelots’ charming home in Paris (usurped and looted, as a shocked Rhys would overhear by chance in a hairdresser’s salon one day, during the Nazi occupation of her favourite city).

The Madonna’s smile offered private solace to Rhys at a time when her cheerful husband was understandably edgy and bad-tempered. A domestic row at the National Portrait Gallery about the relative merits of Jacob Epstein (intriguingly singled out for praise by Max) and James Tissot’s gentle paintings of Parisian scenes (admired by romantic Rhys) ended with Max flying into a rage about Winston Churchill: “so it all ended badly as usual,” Jean confided in one of the long confessional letters within which, during this sojourn in a London limboland, she unburdened herself to Peggy.³

An unexpected source of relief during a miserable three months arrived in the form of a mysterious benefactor. A letter from a London firm of solicitors announced that a modest sum of money would be provided to Rhys for an undetermined period; while this form of charity was not entirely welcome to a woman who hated to feel indebted, the Hamers were undeniably short of ready cash. Max thought that the anonymous donor might be the altruistic Earl of Listowel, Secretary of State to the Colonies, with whom the Hamer family claimed some distant link. Lord Listowel was well known for his charitable deeds; nobody else comes to mind unless kind-hearted Peggy Kirkaldy was trying to help without offending Rhys’s prickly sense of pride.

On two points, Rhys did not waver. Maryvonne was not to be told the truth and Max was not to be abandoned: “I couldn’t give Max away,” Jean told Peggy, and again, in the same letter of 21 April: “I don’t want to leave Max (Mrs Micawber).”⁴ Rhys could—and did—often quarrel with Max, but her loyalty to him never faltered.

On 22 May 1950, following a public trial at the Old Bailey that lasted a fortnight, Max Hamer, aged sixty-eight, was found guilty: his two-year sentence was to be served at Maidstone Prison in Kent. Michael Donn, already in possession of a substantial criminal record, was given four years at a different jail. Despite all that she had suffered through Max’s association with Donn, Rhys warmed to the young man’s mother: “a very simple, kind soul [who] says this is killing her,” she told Peggy, adding that Mrs. Donn, who spoke almost no English, looked very frail.⁵

Max, to his wife’s astonishment, wanted her to share a home with Mrs. Donn; instead, Rhys went to ground for several months at an old-fashioned Welsh inn owned by Peggy Kirkaldy’s bookish friend, Edith Colley. “He [Max] doesn’t know how I like trees, shadows, a shaded light,” she had lamented to Peggy during her pre-trial sojourn in west London.⁶ Staying at the Half Moon Inn in Llanthony, Rhys enjoyed a tranquil view of the misleadingly named Black Mountains’ leaf-green hillsides; perhaps they reminded her of Dominica.

Far from London and the shock of Max’s harsh sentence, Rhys took stock of her situation. She stopped drinking. And, despite her keen and recent interest in the story of an heiress with a “defective mind” who is locked away by her husband to slowly starve to death (Jean had been reading Elizabeth Jenkins’s fact-based gothic novel, Harriet), Rhys set aside her own plans for a book about the imprisoned first wife of Charlotte Brontë’s Mr. Rochester.^† Instead, haunted by the loss of her own precious library, Rhys began work on the story of how two Roseau childhood friends, a girl and a boy, rescue just two books from suffering a similar fate. The boy’s “coloured” mother sets about the destruction of the library acquired by her late husband, a condescending white man. The books that are saved are revealing. The boy, modelled upon a sickly, studious child whom Rhys had befriended during her own childhood in Roseau, rescues Kipling’s Kim, a favourite with Jean’s father. The girl snatches up Fort comme la Mort, the novel by Maupassant from which Rhys had taken the idea of an older lover’s passion for a younger partner for an earlier story: “La Grosse Fifi.” Maupassant ended his short novel with a letter-burning scene; perhaps it was that conflagration which suggested to Rhys her own eventual title for a story called “The Day They Burned the Books.”

By March 1951, Rhys had moved from Wales to Maidstone, the county town of Kent, better known then for the nauseatingly sweet smell of its toffee factory than for the faux-medieval prison building within which Max started saving up his prisoner’s rations to buy chocolates for the sweet-toothed and loyal wife he must have feared he had lost.⁷ Rhys changed lodgings twice more before finally settling into rooms above a friendly Maidstone pub.

As at the Welsh inn, the fragile-looking Rhys was welcomed with genuine kindness. The family who owned the Ropemakers’ Arms sometimes got on her nerves (Jean grumbled in her journal that the innkeeper’s daughter-in-law always sang as she went about her household chores: “that dreadful sobbing break in the middle of the voice”), but the proprietor’s wife was quick to realise that their softly spoken lady lodger was something out of the ordinary. On one occasion, returning from “my obligation walk,” Rhys found that her sitting-room table had been spread with books evidently bought from a local stall; none was to her taste, but she appreciated a thoughtful gesture. (Rhys’s private reading at the time included Sartre’s witty plays and Koestler’s The Age of Longing, a futuristic novel set in Paris). Guiltily, she withdrew her grumbles about the singing daughter-in-law—“as a woman, she is much better than I am. That girl who yowls so horribly is neat, clean, hardworking . . . She runs lightly up and down the stairs without touching the bannister. Light of foot and heart is she!”⁸

That passage appears in a remarkable document that was eventually employed to bulk out Rhys’s posthumously published memoir, Smile Please. Written in a small brown exercise book, “The Rope-Makers’ Arms Diary”^‡ opens with the enigmatic words: “Death before the Fact,” remembered by Rhys from a favourite passage in Teresa of Ávila’s Meditations. The diarist then instructs herself: no chance will be permitted to revise or to have second thoughts. “Down it shall go. Already I am terrified.”⁹ What follows takes the form of a day in court, with Rhys challenging herself as she stands in the dock.

Trials and confinements had, over the past few years, played an increasingly significant role in Rhys’s life; here, however, she took control of her fate. At first, the questions are put by an anonymous interrogator; later, a knowing prosecutor (“There you are! Didn’t take long, did it?”) is replaced by a more understanding counsel for the defence (“Did you in your youth have a great love and pity for others?” Yes, I think so. “Especially for the poor and the unfortunate?” Yes.) These external voices are replaced by that of the author as she searches for a reason to go on living—and finds it in her writings.

Phrases in what was evidently always meant to be a private piece of work (“Oh the relief of words,” and “How clumsily I’m writing. Start again”) suggest that this extraordinary confessional marked Rhys’s first nervous step towards resuming literary work since her arrival in Maidstone. Writing, she told herself in the journal, was what she must do in order to justify her existence. “If I stop writing my life will have been an abject failure,” she wrote. “I will not have earned death.”¹⁰

Much emerges from this intimate, heroically honest document. It’s clear that Rhys had not lost her sardonic sense of humour (“O.K. O.K. That brings me to my bedroom in waltz time”) or her courage, presented in the half-remembered words of her beloved Saint Teresa: “At the cost of a long death before the fact, I shall conquer this world that is ever new, ever young. Dare to follow me and you will see.” She isn’t afraid here to convict herself of all the mortal sins—drunkenness is included—except for one that she adds only to clear herself of the charge: coolness of heart. Neither will Rhys permit the probing voice in her head to convict her of committing what she terms, in the Catholic fashion learned at her convent school, “the venial sins.” After identifying these lesser, forgivable sins as spite, malice, gluttony, envy, avarice, stupidity, caution and cruelty, the diary-keeper sweeps her self-made list of minor crimes away, more grandly than any judge: “I cannot any longer accept all this. Do you mean that you are guiltless of the venial sins? Well. Guiltless!”

The evidence that Rhys never intended to publish such a private record is clear: she used that same small exercise book to draft—and then tear out—the letters that accused her sister of trying to lock her away in an asylum. But Diana Athill was right to add “The Ropemakers’ Arms Diary” to her author’s posthumously published memoir; nothing Rhys ever wrote was more bravely revealing.

DISGRACED AND PERMANENTLY disbarred from his profession, Max Hamer was an unemployable man of seventy when he walked out of Maidstone prison in May 1952. His wife, aged almost sixty-two, had not published a word for thirteen years. Their mysterious benefactor’s assistance had ceased. Rhys was living on the modest allowance provided by her surviving siblings,^§ to which members of the Hamer family added a small annual payment in compensation for the modest naval allowance that was cancelled when Max was convicted. (Typically, for an always improvident man, Max Hamer had no pension.)

Life in the centre of London was beyond the Hamers’ economic reach; instead, they squeezed themselves into a couple of small rooms in a shared house on Milestone Road in Upper Norwood, just north of the enormous, landscaped park that surrounded the burned-out remains of Joseph Paxton’s Crystal Palace.^¶ Writing to Maryvonne in June, and again in August, Jean was valiantly cheerful. A Polish co-tenant was doing a splendid job on the minute garden. The pond was filled with goldfish and the roses were glorious. Just one heartfelt statement offered a glimpse of what Rhys had endured during her husband’s prison sentence: “I like so much not being alone.”¹¹

Rhys’s response to a change of home was always the same. Beginning in euphoria, she rapidly plunged into gloom. Six months after their move to Norwood, Max—he was almost certainly prompted by Jean—sought advice from the former husband of Norah Hoult, one of his wife’s earliest literary admirers. Oliver Stonor had remarried and moved to Devon, where the cost of living was low when compared to London. Did “Mr Bishop” (Stonor’s literary pseudonym) remember having praised Miss Rhys’s work? Max wondered. Now, his wife had a new novel “all planned out” and needed only a quiet country home in which to write. Might Mr. Stonor know of such a place in Devon?¹²

Sadly, Oliver Stonor was unable to help, and Jean’s prudent older brother ruled out hare-brained plans for the couple to live in a caravan. Nevertheless, Rhys struck up a literary correspondence with Stonor who, as she was quick to appreciate, was an unusually well-read man. (He had recently published a short and erudite study of William Blake.) Max was not greatly interested in books; Rhys’s letters to Stonor glow with all her old passion for the one world—other than her Dominican girlhood—in which she could always take refuge. Here was a man who shared her admiration for the technique of Maupassant’s short stories and understood why, in January 1953, she rated Hemingway’s 1927 short story “Hills Like White Elephants” above his highly praised and recently published novella, The Old Man and the Sea.¹³

Hemingway had become one of the world’s best-known writers. Rhys’s novels were known only to a discerning few. On 5 March 1953, while confined to her bed by flu, she comforted a despairing Stonor about the future of his own work: “You have fifteen long years probably to be still at your best,” she reassured him. “As a writer longer.” All that really matters, as she was well positioned to advise her friend, is to endure: “I don’t believe in the individual Writer so much as in Writing. It uses you and throws you away when you are not useful any longer. But it does not do this until you are useless and quite useless too. Meanwhile there is nothing to do but plod along line upon line.”¹⁴

Apologising for her earnestness (“Max says I alarm people because I am so serious”), Rhys turned down Stonor’s suggestion that the two of them should meet. “I’m a bit afraid of people now,” Jean confessed, before slipping away into chatter about her cousin Lily, now living in London and composing Creole calypsos and songs “better than anyone . . . a natural born money maker 1953—I feel it in my bones.”¹⁵

THE ABSENCE OF an obvious market may have contributed to Rhys’s decision to drop work on a Caribbean prequel to Jane Eyre (the novel which Max had confidently described to Stonor as “all planned out”). Instead, she turned her thoughts to radio plays.

Back in the early 1950s, growing rivalry with television was making BBC radio hungry for innovative new work. The pay was generous and a successful drama was usually granted a paid repeat. Rhys herself had no connection with the BBC, but she knew someone who did. Selma Vaz Dias’s career had been prospering since her well-remembered visit to Beckenham. She had played a leading role in the London-based French production of Jean Genet’s The Maids in 1952; in 1953, Selma was booked to appear both on stage at the Embassy Theatre, and on the radio as Lady Macbeth. Her influence within the BBC at that time was considerable.

From January 1953, Jean Rhys spent six months pursuing Selma with an urgency that betrays how badly she needed to earn some money. A promised dramatisation of Quartet, with a role for Selma herself, was followed by a flood of poems and stories, including some very early work (“Houdia” and “Susan and Suzanne” both pre-dated Quartet) and the more recently completed “The Day They Burned the Books” (for which a nervous Rhys expressed little hope since “most people find it dull.”^#)¹⁶ All came to nothing; by June—having also failed to interest the BBC in Lily Lockhart’s calypsos—Selma was forced to discourage her. Rhys struggled to sound insouciant: “Really I am not worried about the BBC. It would have been a miracle if they approved of anything I write or wrote and I do think you were a heroine to try. Thank you.” Rhys’s appeal for communication (“Ring me up if ever you feel like it”) seems not to have evoked a response.¹⁷

Consolation arrived in September in the form of a long-promised visit from Maryvonne and Job Moerman with their five-year-old child. The Moermans were briefly back from Jakarta and spending time in Holland with a fragile Jean Lenglet, to whom a concerned Rhys sent her “best love,” and his equally frail Polish wife, Elizabeth Kassakowska.¹⁸ Rhys plotted out their route for a quick late-summer tour of England, ensuring that her little family saw Cambridge and Ely cathedral as well as Savernake Forest and the pretty village of Burford, wistfully remembered by Jean for its exceptional tranquillity. The Moermans also made time for two expeditions to Milestone Road. “I was bursting with pleasure, my darling,” Rhys wrote after their first visit and, following their second: “I send hugs and kisses as many as you want, and my best and deepest love.”¹⁹ However poor a mother Rhys judged herself to have been, she never lacked affection for a daughter to whom she regularly wrote two or three letters a week.

In October, the Hamers undertook a disastrous experiment. Yacht Atlast—permanently moored at Haverfordwest in a remote and very English corner of south Wales—took their fancy because of the Welsh location and because the rent was low. The reason swiftly became apparent; the boat’s only habitable cabins were buried in a dark hold at the foot of a rope ladder, within a space dimly lit by a series of unworkable gadgets. The washbasin taps didn’t function; for company, the unhappy tenants had a frisky troop of mice. Rhys, clambering down the swaying ladder one night, missed a rung and fell. By January 1954, the couple were back in central London; by April, Rhys was airily joking to her daughter that she looked (in the opinion of one candid doctor) as though a horse had stamped on her face. Her fall had been serious; back problems would plague Rhys for many years to come.²⁰

While the Moermans returned to the East Indies and to an even more dangerous posting—Makassar, capital of the island of Celebes, was notorious for its violence—the Hamers themselves settled in the spring of 1954 at a shabby, half-empty London hotel on Lancaster Terrace, close to Hyde Park. Charges were modest in an area that had been badly damaged by wartime bombing. Rhys blocked out a view of blitzed house fronts with bright yellow window curtains; two cherished blue-glass fish were placed where they could best catch the light. The Hamers remained at the Elizabeth Hotel for a year and a half; the need to live even more economically took them next down to Cornwall, where they settled close to Bude, near the Devon border, in the autumn of 1955.

The move to Cornwall’s rugged north coast was not an immediate success. After six chilly months in an isolated clifftop bungalow intended for summer lets (the sea view across the aptly named Widemouth Bay was spectacular), “Bellair” was hopefully exchanged by the Hamers for “Garden Bungalow” at the nearby hamlet of Upton. Here, gardenless, and under constant patrol from a vigilant landlord, the carless couple still had to take a mile-long windswept walk along the cliffs in order to shop at Bude. By July, Rhys and Max had moved again. Their new home consisted of two rented rooms and a kitchen at 4 Cartaret Street—a small and featureless hilltop road close to the post office, Somerleaze Downs and Bude’s most recently added attraction, a vast concrete “seapool” for outdoor swimming. Perhaps Jean sauntered down from Cartaret Street to bathe there (Rhys always firmly distinguished “bathing,” which she loved, from swimming, which she disliked) while listening to the mighty roar of Atlantic breakers, out beyond Bude’s expansive tidal beach. The sound brought back memories of when she first heard that same majestic Atlantic roar competing against the soft sigh of the Caribbean, on either side of a narrow isthmus jutting out from the south-west coast of Dominica at Scott’s Head.

Rhys had learned that her daughter was ill, but not that she had been taken into hospital while out in the East Indies. (Tuberculosis was diagnosed later, following the Moermans’ return to Holland.) Not worrying Maryvonne was, nevertheless, an evident objective of the long, chatty letters that Jean regularly despatched from Bude to distant Makassar. Nothing too negative was mentioned; instead, Rhys joked about their Cartaret Street landlady’s persistent attempts to sell her untreasured knick-knacks to a reluctant tenant. Painting in words a comic picture of her own ageing self as she scuttled along a cliff path in a high wind, “chasing my poor old hat, swearing all the time,” Jean went out of her way to praise Max for his irrepressible kindness and good cheer.²¹ Sometimes, between grumbles about the dismal supply of books available at Bude’s railway bookstore—there was no other—she mentioned what she was reading. In 1955, she had taken the trouble to post Maryvonne one of her own firm favourites, Stevie Smith’s Novel on Yellow Paper. Published in 1936, Smith’s first novel shared Rhys’s unusual combination of a poet’s ear with a bleakly sardonic perception of the difficulty for an outspoken, strong-willed woman to inhabit a world of conventional views. “We carry our own wilderness within us,” Smith remarked in her second novel, Over the Frontier (1938). Rhys would have agreed.

And, at last, in the autumn of 1956, there was good news to report. The BBC had succeeded in making contact with Rhys about the long-deferred adaptation of her novel; Sasha Moorsom, a talented young poet and producer, and an ardent fan of Rhys’s work, was eager to bring her finest novel to a wider audience.

“I feel sure that I have to thank you,” an excited Rhys wrote to Selma Vaz Dias on 16 October; six days later, she reported the change in her fortunes to Maryvonne, by then living in Surabaya. “It has come off! The BBC are going to do Good Morning [Midnight]. Just in time! I was nearly done.”²²

Rhys’s gratitude to Vaz Dias was not misplaced. In the autumn of 1956, nobody at the BBC seems to have known whether Jean Rhys was still alive or—if this were the case—where to find her. Neither, when Moorsom contacted the actress, who was then appearing in the first English production of Jean Genet’s The Maids, did Selma.^** On 19 October, Vaz Dias revealed to Rhys the various routes by which she herself had fruitlessly tried to track down her elusive friend for Miss Moorsom. A letter to Lily Lockhart was returned unopened from an out-of-date address; Rhys’s most recent publisher, Constable, thought she was dead; Peggy Kirkaldy hadn’t heard a word from Rhys for four years, after refusing her request for a loan. Finally, Selma had suggested that Miss Moorsom might place an advertisement in the New Statesman, just as she herself had done seven years earlier. An unnamed friend of Rhys’s had noticed the ad and had passed along the news to Bude.²³

Selma’s generous warmth—and the knowledge that she had not, after all, been quite forgotten—filled Jean with hope and energy. Between October 1956 and February 1957, Rhys advised Selma on how best to shorten her adaptation of Good Morning, Midnight for its airing in May. Their correspondence was outspoken, but companionable. When Selma insisted on using the word “rustle” for the swish of a silk dressing gown, as Sasha Jensen’s sinister last lover slips into her darkened hotel room, Rhys raised only a tentative protest (“she must hear it and it isn’t quite right for a man’s dressing gown somehow. Do you think?”) before deciding to let Selma have her way.²⁴

Towards the end of February 1957, just as the Hamers were at last preparing to move out of their town lodgings and into a more remote home of their own on the far side of Bude’s tidal beach, news came of a preliminary reading—the first of two—which were to be given at the BBC. Rhys was determined to be present; a gratified Selma invited the Hamers to dine with her family at home after the performance.

The lengthy preliminary reading—in 1957, it was the longest play ever to have been performed on radio by a single actress—was a success. Always easily moved to tears, Rhys wept as she listened to the caustic, insidious murmur with which Vaz Dias seemed to inhabit Sasha Jansen’s personality, body and soul. Rhys often told Selma that she thought of Good Morning, Midnight as belonging to them both. Having listened, mesmerised, to the recording of Selma’s extraordinary interpretation which survives in Tulsa’s McFarlin collection, I can understand why.

Seated in the Eglis’ cosy Hampstead kitchen later that same evening while Selma’s family toasted the actress’s successful rehearsal performance, Jean Rhys spoke as if for the very first time of her ideas for a novel that would explore the earlier life of Jane Eyre’s Creole predecessor, the mad first wife whom Mr. Rochester had locked away in a Thornfield attic. And so it was, as both Selma and Rhys would always agree, that Wide Sargasso Sea—still provisionally named “Mrs Rochester”—came into being at the candlelit table in the Eglis’ kitchen, assisted by a sense of tremendous good cheer about the BBC’s production and by liberal quantities of Hans Egli’s wine: “it’s the nicest thing that’s happened to me, for years and weary years,” Rhys wrote to Selma from her new home in Bude on 7 March 1957.

Excited though Rhys was (“I came back [from London] brimful of ideas,” she told Selma on 18 March), she still hesitated before committing herself to the novel that she had been pondering for so many years. Instead, eager for another radio success, Rhys sent Selma her old idea for an eighteenth-century naval drama set at Antigua’s English Harbour, suggesting its suitability for broadcasting, while presenting it as a current work which “ought to be ready in a day or two.”²⁵ Silence followed: evidently, neither Selma nor Sasha Moorsom was keen to pursue the project.

ON 3 MAY, a week ahead of the public broadcast of Good Morning, Midnight, the Radio Times ran a puff piece by Selma under the enticing title: “In Quest of a Missing Author.” Nobody could have known how close its content was to the impassioned piece that Selma had been preparing to write back in 1949, before she first made contact with Jean Rhys. Five days later, Rhys opened a letter from an eloquent admirer who had read Selma’s article. His name was Francis Wyndham and he wanted to know whether Miss Rhys might have a work in progress. If so, might she care to grant an option on it to the publishing company with whom he worked?

Wyndham’s timing was impeccable. Selma’s broadcast on 10 May—repeated the following evening—was widely heard and admired. Within days, Rhys had heard from several fans and another interested publisher. But Wyndham had got there first and the prospect of being paid for an option on the spot was irresistible. So Rhys said yes.

On 1 June 1957, Jean wrote to thank Francis Wyndham’s female colleague at André Deutsch for the cheque which sealed her commitment. Twenty-five pounds was a paltry sum to offer for the rights to an unsubmitted work, as Diana Athill, the colleague in question, would later readily admit. On the other hand, Jean Rhys had published nothing for a very long time. Rhys herself was delighted. Having assured the unknown Miss Athill that her new novel was already progressing well, she promised to deliver a completed manuscript before the end of the year.

*Selma Vaz Dias had appeared in cameo as a train passenger in the film The Lady Vanishes in 1938, but Hitchcock’s title also seems fitting for Jean Rhys’s disappearance from public view after Max’s trial.

†Jenkins’s well-received novel was based upon an actual case, but her debt to Brontë’s Jane Eyre is apparent. What clearly interested Rhys about a book she called “a horrible and sinister thing” was that—unlike Brontë’s crude characterisation of Bertha Mason—Jenkins represented the unfortunate Harriet as a sympathetic character, one with whom the reader could identify.

‡“Diary” is an inexact description. Rhys interspersed the fictional trial of herself with personal responses to her life in Maidstone (the audience at a cinema matinee; the owners of the pub; her rooms) and sudden time shifts into reminiscences of Dominica and her first years in England.

§Edward Rees Williams had prudently invested a small sum in government gilts in order to provide his sister with a reliable source of income; Robert Powell (married to Rhys’s younger sister) was also continuing to make regular contributions.

¶Space restrictions at Milestone Road are apparent from Rhys’s doleful references to “The Iron Maiden,” a fold-up bed which frequently threatened to trap her fingers.

#Rhys’s reference to the number of people to whom she has been showing her work reminds us that she was never so entirely out of touch with the literary world as her myth suggests.

**Selma was reprising the performance as Solange (in English) that she had given (in French) in 1952. This was her Genet moment; in April 1957, she played Madame Irma in the world premiere of The Balcony, directed once again by Peter Zadek.