Those two main parts are separated (or linked?) by a photograph album which was probably inserted as a bow to the requirements of the genre and perhaps to tally with the readers’ expectations, thus for marketing purposes. This part spans the 1910s when Rhys discovered England as a young student first, then as a chorus girl, and the early 1920s when she was a newly-wed in Paris and Vienna, up to the summer 1921. The second, entitled ‘It Began to Grow Cold’ by the editor Diana Athill, is composed of material which was not considered by Jean Rhys to be finished work, 1 some of it being little more than notes. It is also a puzzling text because under the heading Smile Please, a variety of artefacts can be found: the first text also entitled Smile Please is the only one Rhys had time to revise and correct, it is devoted to Dominica and her childhood until she left the island when she was 17 in 1907. Rhys died before she had finished dictating her whole life hence the subtitle ‘an unfinished autobiography’. Their relationship, although friendly at first, became stormy and fraught with mistrust and anxiety on each side. David Plante, a young American writer, suggested she should dictate her reminiscences to him.

But by the time she faced the prospect of writing her life down (between 19) she was an elderly woman who suffered from a heart condition and whose deformed fingers could not hold a pen anymore. It was written at a time when Jean Rhys was finally an acclaimed writer, after years of oblivion and dire straits, her novel Wide Sargasso Sea having brought recognition and a modicum of financial safety. 1 See the foreword to Smile Please by Diana Athill (Rhys 1979, 8).ġ Smile Please is a puzzling and fascinating text in many regards but first and foremost because of its rather unusual gestation.

My inventions autobiographer