[Jean Rhys's life is] a terrible story but an uncommon one in our century, which is more notable for the falls from glory that follow on a too eager appreciation of writers than for the neglect of talent, and it makes the publication of Miss Rhys's autobiography ["Smile Please"] an event of more than ordinary interest. What about this survivor? Who was the woman who wrote those remarkable novels in the first place? For remarkable they were and are—lean, hard, as frightening as they are exact in their quiet statement of emotional desolation.

But more than curiosity about the personal history of so gifted an author, legitimate as that is, is involved in our interest in the life of Jean Rhys. Miss Rhys is an obsessed writer whose novels move scarcely at all beyond their central characters—all of them, despite their altered names, the same woman at different stages of experience—or their theme of female victimization. We now have it in Jean Rhys's own words—"People have always been shadows to me…. I have never known other people. I have only ever written about myself"—but it was never difficult to guess that she was herself the subject (or is it the object?) of her fiction. There was the possibility and hope that her memoir might help us understand the mysterious process by which she transformed such an extreme of self-absorption into her lovely art.

But unfortunately this book with the nice title, "Smile Please," is markedly disappointing except as it underscores Jean Rhys's second obsession, with craft. There are a few soft sentences, a few agitated passages but, these apart, Miss Rhys's prose is as astute and unfaltering as ever. In fact, it is only by a miracle that it escapes being depressing in its precision and cautions. (p. 1)

Miss Rhys seems to have been impelled by the desire to wring yet one more story out of her life—more than it is an autobiography, "Smile Please" is her nonfiction novel. Once more we are given the hardships of a chorus girl touring the English provinces and once more the already well-covered episode of her first marriage, but nothing of her second and third marriages nor of her still-living daughter, nothing of the relationship with Ford and nothing of the life she must have led between husbands. Even the childhood portion advances us little in insight into her formative years.

But though a faint air of exploitation inevitably surrounds the publication of so deficient a performance, "Smile Please" has at least the negative usefulness of confirming the lack of invention in Miss Rhys's work. Even "Wide Sargasso Sea," which purports to tell the story of the mad first wife of Rochester in "Jane Eyre," simply promotes the heroine of Miss Rhys's earlier novels to new reaches of victimization.

Indisputably there is a Rhys woman: beautiful, childlike in her vulnerability, of solid birth but without money of her own and therefore uncared for, slated for catastrophe. Bewildered by the world, she has no focus in her life. She is also unable to be free of the entrapments of her own nature, which is compounded of contradiction: Passive to the point of inertness, she is wantonly bold; lacking in significant personal pride, she is unyieldingly imperious; cut off from others, she is a shameless dependent. In pain her recourse is drink or sleep—she is among the world's most tired souls….

To read the early work of Jean Rhys alongside that of Hemingway is as good a way as any to recognize the distance at which she stood from her famous contemporaries of the 20's and 30's. At the peak of his reputation, Hemingway was thought to have given us the ultimate statement of our modern despair: we inhabited a world without a future….

[The] difference between Hemingway's view and Jean Rhys's—is his firm, if perhaps suspect, imagination of what life could be, were it only to put itself on the side of grace. No character in Hemingway is inaccessible to strong feeling. None sleepwalks from one bed to the next. The unhappiness of the modern world is measured, in fact, by its devastating assault upon powerful emotion.

For Hemingway, that is, the wasteland is not within us. It is out there, looming before us. For Jean Rhys emptiness has not only been achieved; we have incorporated it into our lives as individuals. "But I love you," her heroines say to the men who are trying to pay them off and be rid of them, and they make these fumbling protestations as if delivering themselves of sentiments too big for formulation and too cogent for questioning. But how this love is defined, or demonstrates itself, Miss Rhys hasn't managed to communicate, and we are left to wonder by what alteration of human perception these women can be deceived that their hollow offerings are gifts of actual feeling.

In other words, writing in the 20's and 30's Jean Rhys prefigured a period that would be better prepared to receive her. She was a premature spokeswoman for the psychological 60's and 70's, these decades that have taught us words like "isolate," "unrelated," "affectless," "borderline," and sent countless men and women into make-do clinics for instruction in the exotic arts of touching and screaming. (p. 17)