In Rhys's autobiographical fragment [Smile Please], as in her fiction, life is outside, an indefinable and elusive otherness. Whether she longs to lose herself in a man, a place or an event, the woman can only put herself in the way of it, waiting for it to brush past and leave her even emptier of herself than before.

Smile Please shows that Rhys's passion for loss came from the beauty and corruption of the island of Dominica, where the whites died young or went mad or drunk from the illegible intensities of a paradise which wasn't theirs…. In Smile Please, Rhys admits she wanted to be black, to be free from repressive white history, but eventually she came to hate the blacks for taking back the island which was the vessel holding her past. After such a vivid, poisoned youth, Rhys could never be a native anywhere…. (pp. 253-54)

Smile Please doesn't illuminate the differences between Rhys's felt life and her fiction. Instead it is a stylistic and narrative coda to her novels and stories, Rhys's last chance to rework incidents and perceptions which she had already written several times. There is no octogenarian setting the record straight, that last infirmity of noble minds, because on the evidence of Smile Please, the life that counted, the life of feeling, appears to have already been absorbed into the fiction. Many names, phrases and sentences about Rhys's girlhood in Smile Please are identical or almost identical with passages in her novels, to say nothing of the thematic repetitions. If this holds more true of the earlier passages, it must be only because Rhys died before she could revise the later chapters into line with their more fully realised fictive versions…. [There] isn't really much privileged information to be had in Smile Please. The privilege is, simply, to be able to read a little more of Rhys's writing.

Jean Rhys's novels show a striking discrepancy between their emotional impact and their language, which, while emotive, is simple and understated…. Although Rhys's books are unashamedly about female subjectivity, her cool modernistically controlled language never demands a response from the reader which the action itself might not naturally bring forth. Unlike Anais Nin, Elizabeth Smart or Kate Millett, who implicitly claim a unique sensitivity through the attention-getting emotionalism of a heightened prose, Rhys's novels wear the protective colouring of minor works, drawing as little attention to themselves as possible. Feminine rather than feminist, her novels, like their heroines, present themselves as victims to the reader. I have a nasty suspicion that Rhys's deference, as much as her accomplishment, is why she is belatedly becoming the thinking man's favourite woman writer. (p. 254)