Jean Rhys's world, as seen in her three volumes of short stories, is a unified one. In every story a central consciousness, whether narrator, implied narrator, or protagonist, perceives and responds to reality in essentially the same terms. Rhys has said of her work: "I start to write about something that has happened or is happening to me, but somehow or other things start changing." One might argue that thus is all fiction forged. But in Rhys's work, the autobiographical beginnings are responsible for this central consciousness which we may take to be Rhys's own; the other things that "start changing" are her patternings of experience into a coherent world-view. Rhys is not at all interested in creating individual characters. She does create again and again a society of types acting out the attitudes and assumptions which keep that society intact. Her stories have the strong cumulative effect of a sorrowful, scornful anatomy of essential evil. (p. 235)

"In a Café" [from her first collection, The Left Bank,] is a good early example of Rhys's central consciousness as observer rather than participant; [the story] fully prefigures her later arrangements of ideas, and is skillfully wrought. (pp. 235-36)

In "Goodbye Marcus, Goodbye Rose" [from her third collection, Sleep It Off, Lady,] two possibilities for women are presented to Phoebe. One is the respectable, conventional life she has been taught to expect: in it, chastity is a woman's sole guarantee of marriage, jewels, servants, children, freedom, and respectability. On the practical level, Phoebe is mistaken to believe this way is not possible for her: her virginity is intact. Intuitively, however, she is correct: her chastity is gone forever. Her great mistake is to believe that the life reserved for wicked, unchaste women is her, or anyone's alternative. (p. 238)

"Till September Petronella" is from Rhys's middle volume, Tigers are Better-Looking…. It features Petronella, who could well be Phoebe ten years later, alone in London. The action of this story is more complex and extended…. [Unexplained] actions seem random and meaningless. The significance of "Till September Petronella" is revealed in Petronella's vague half-thoughts, in what is said, and in the gradual accumulation of symbolic detail. (p. 239)

[It] is a fully-realized story unified by time, place, and symbols. It begins in Petronella's room and ends there two days later. References to the arts provide the allusive backbone of meaning…. These are like signposts in a foreign country in a language Petronella has begun to understand. By incorporating these references, Rhys is making a point about the mythical, religious, and artistic bases of behaviour in the culture to which Petronella must adapt.

"I Used to Live Here Once" is the last story in [Sleep It Off, Lady]…. It is a tiny story, less than two pages long, which, because of its location in Rhys's oeuvre gives the impression of a finale. It relates a brief, emotionally significant incident during Jean Rhys's return after many years of exile to her old home in Dominica. (p. 241)

When [the main character] approaches the boy and girl on the lawn of her old home she calls "Hello" several times to them, says "I used to live here once" and "her arms went out instinctively with the longing to touch them." The boy gazes expressionlessly at her, says to the girl, "'Hasn't it gone cold all of a sudden. D'you notice? Let's go in …'" and she watches them running from her. The last sentence is: "That was the first time she knew."

What she knows is that she has brought on the cold. Her strangeness inspires mistrust if not fear in children…. And there can be no return home to her warm and colourful West Indian world.

There is another, a symbolic, reading of this episode. The stepping stones across the river, variously safe and treacherous, represent a dangerous passage through life. It is as if the character has died in that life and is crossing the eternal river searching for her lost heaven. As she walks the broad road feeling "extraordinarily happy," dangers past, she looks up at the blue glassy sky, which is strange to her, unremembered, as if she has entered a new sphere. The description "glassy" is a warning hint: glass is man-made, hard. Still she goes on, and with great excitement looks at the house she has been wanting to see. It is white and "worn stone steps" lead up to it. At the top are two very fair children. But as she approaches them, asserting that she belongs here too, they flee from a draught of cold as if she were a ghost they cannot see. If this was the heaven she had struggled and travelled to reach again, she has just been cast out by the angels, doomed to remain in the limbo of death in life she has known. I accept this reading as Rhys's final comment on life and the life to come. It is all too likely that, heaven being man-made, painted white and peopled by angels in whom "white blood is asserting itself against all odds," there, as here, the orderly and respectable citizen will be preferred to the chaotic yearning consciousness of the exile. This is what "she" and Rhys know: to be an outcast in life is to be an outcast for eternity. This bleakly poetic final vision is the most fitting culmination of Rhys's world-view. (pp. 241-42)

"Goodbye Marcus, Goodbye Rose" and "I Used to Live Here Once" are intensely observed, economically presented brief periods in a life, which expand in meaning after reading until we understand the whole of the characters' lives and the attitudes of the society which produced them. "In a Café" and "Till September Petronella" are complete stories which present the organization of a whole world: their effect on the reader is that of looking at a mandala. The circle image also applies to Rhys's stories as a whole and describes her world-view.

The central, organizing consciousness contributes much to the overall impression of oneness. This consciousness is Rhys's own; each female character represents a fragment of it. Each is alone, and learns, if she can, the same lesson about her relation to the world. One might almost say that Rhys has told the same story 46 times, only finding different characters, settings, and symbols to convey her meaning. I do not mean by this to slight the real range and diversity of Rhys's stories. (pp. 242-43)

Her stories insistently expose the position of the lone woman in any society, whether West Indian, French, or English. Money, the need to have it, is very important. Most of Rhys's female characters have little or no training, no family, no secure position…. Indeed, these women have no real name, no separate identity; money is only one aspect of that. (p. 243)

It is not by chance that Phoebe, Petronella, and all the others are exiles or outcasts…. "In a Café," "Goodbye Marcus, Goodbye Rose," and "Till September Petronella" show staid middle-class men casually using vulnerable and unfortunate females and, incidentally, the disdain and cruelty of women who intend never to be in that position. Phoebe and Petronella and all their sisters are altered by men's treatment of them; in the future they will behave so as to fulfill the men's and society's original intention for them.

Rhys's world-view is uncompromising: the making of scapegoats is society's first and necessary evil. The so-called "respectable" men … project their sexuality outside of their comfortable religious, family, and social establishments onto designated outcasts. These men are destroying an aspect of themselves inimical to society's smooth functioning: this is why Rhys's lone women are dismissed by polite society and ultimately destroyed. Stray, "wicked" women are shown to be necessary to the perpetuation of the "decent" world. "I Used to Live Here Once" flatly dismisses sanguine hopes for a more tolerant future, whether placed in a new generation or in a life hereafter and thus completes the circle of social relations which is Jean Rhys's central preoccupation. (pp. 243-44)