The reason that I always think of Jean Rhys as a hurt and angry child trapped in the body of a sensual woman is that I came to her work, not through her novels or stories, but through Smile Please. Written at the end of her long life, in a voice as clear as though she were recalling yesterday’s events, Rhys’s evocative, tender and painfully truthful memoir describes the first years of her life in Dominica, the wild and still untamed Caribbean island where she grew up—and where she said that she wanted her bones one day to lie. Smile Please ends in 1924, five years after Rhys had unregretfully exchanged a hand-to-mouth existence in London for a vagabond’s life in Paris, the city which would provide the setting for her first novel, Quartet.
Later, as I read the short stories and the five novels on which Rhys’s enduring reputation as one of the best women writers of the twentieth century justly stands, I began to understand the tremendous importance of those early years in Dominica. Memories of the island haunt Rhys’s work; they inhabited her mind until her death in 1979.
Seeing Dominica with my own eyes while visiting the places that Rhys knew and loved best—all her family’s former residences are now destroyed or buried under a verdant island’s lush, fast-growing vegetation—helped me to understand Rhys’s passion for her Caribbean birthplace, and why the hostility that she first sensed there bred her enduring feeling of alienation. She poured both the passion and the alienation into the characters of the women about whom she wrote. Self-knowledge meant everything to Rhys. Each of those fictional women was granted elements of their author’s pitilessly scrutinised personality. As painfully self-aware as their creator, they, too, can be by turns watchful; shocking; angry; witty, and ruthless. Like Rhys herself, they learn to rely on drink for courage and consolation. Unlike her, they neither read much—Rhys was an avid and discerning reader, especially of French poetry and modern French fiction—nor do they write.
“I must write,” Rhys once wrote in a private diary, before adding that it was only by her writing that she could “earn” death. (“A reward?” she asked herself in the same entry, and answered, simply: “Yes.”1) Deprived of their author’s crucial sense of purpose, the women who belong to the world of Rhys’s bleak and often savagely comic fictions are more helpless than their strong-willed—and often downright wilful—maker ever was.
Rhys needed to be strong in order to keep faith with her vocation. I can’t think of another woman writer of her time who overcame such dismaying and ongoing setbacks with such determination. Nor can I think of one who created so many problems for herself by her transgressive behaviour: a persistent and audaciously perverse refusal ever to comply with what was expected from her. Heartbreak, poverty, notoriety, breakdowns and even imprisonment: all became grist to Rhys’s fiction-making mill. What she never wrote about were the challenging years of literary oblivion from which “Jean Rhys” emerged at last into a blaze of international celebrity that the reclusive writer had neither sought nor desired.
Today, Rhys’s work is widely taught. Young graduates who know nothing about her life find it easy to relate to her proud and vulnerable loners. Teachers like to suggest an exercise in which comparisons are made between Virginia Woolf’s celebrated “room of one’s own” and one of the coffin-like hotel rooms in which Rhys’s victimised characters hide away from a world they dread and despise. Students like the concept of Woolf’s idealised private study. They believe in Rhys’s imagined haunts.
Imagined? Rhys did experience times of forlorn desperation when she lived in just such rooms. But not always. In the same way that she bestowed only specific traits from her personality on her characters, she allowed them to experience some—but never all—of her own adventures. Rhys was a novelist, not a journalist. Much was added; much more was withheld. Researching this book and talking to the people who knew Rhys have helped me to appreciate the depth of the chasm that separates the composite creature whom many critics still knowingly categorise as “the Rhys woman” from the writer who created that vulnerable entity.
Rhys often said that she wrote about herself because that was all she knew. Today, her readers still intuitively relate to a voice that whispers terrible truths into the ears of each and every one of us. I hope that I’ve succeeded in showing what courage and faith it took to create that unique voice, and to persist when hope seemed dead. I know already how much I shall miss the daily company of a demanding, volatile, self-absorbed and often darkly funny writer, a woman whom the hypercritical Francis Wyndham once fondly praised as the most bewitching companion that he had ever known.