[Jean Rhys's] heroines may be called Anna Morgan, Julia Martin, Marya Zelli, Sasha Jensen, but they are always Jean Rhys…. They are victims, of whom it would be beside the point to say that they are passive, acquiesce in their victimization, for, despite their ability to walk the boulevards of Paris and to buy an occasional hat, they are prisoners, and a novel like Good Morning, Midnight, in its claustrophobia, in its dispassionate recording of its protagonist's efforts to keep alive through another day, brings to mind Dostoevsky or Solzhenitsyn…. I suspect that readers, particularly women, respond so strongly to Rhys's novels because they express indelibly one aspect of the female condition—the limitation, the dependence, the despair. There is nothing exhilarating about these novels except the art with which they are made, the art which was in fact, in Rhys's life, the only triumphant response to a dreary record of experience. (p. 597)

I do not mean to imply that these novels slavishly follow the events of Rhys's life, or that they record all there is to tell about that life. She was an artist with a rigorous sense of what the shape of her novel demanded, praised quite correctly by [Ford Madox] Ford…. (p. 598)

Her autobiography was to be a repository of fact.

In pursuit of fact, Rhys demonstrates how not to write an autobiography. (That she was very old and frequently soused when she wrote probably contributed, too, to the undermining of the "singular instinct for form.") She seems to assume that if she can remember something accurately, it is therefore significant, producing pathetic, unconnected, insignificant fragments of memory of the sort precious only to the memorialist: the family cook was a good cook; her fish dishes were delicious, but her soup was not; she refused to make puddings; Mother had to make all the sweets…. These scraps of memory, however charming some of them may be, make irritating reading overall unless one accepts that there is no structure or form to give them significance. It is possible, then, to be touched by their very fragmentariness, by the autobiographer's effort to grasp one fact after another, to bring it up to the light of consciousness out of oblivion, by her treating it—however scrappy—like a precious treasure….

Smile Please lacks the underlying brilliance of conception which makes Wide Sargasso Sea Rhys's masterpiece and, in its insistence upon the contrast between a lush, sensuous childhood in the tropics and a dreary, oppressed maturity in England, more truly her autobiography than the one she calls that. (p. 599)

For various reasons, one should not put off to old age the writing of one's autobiography…. [In Smile Please the facts Rhys] wanted so much to record are not fully recorded. Ironically, the mysteries of her life—among them, what she did for [the] twenty years in which she did not write—are mysteries still…. It is striking that its best-written and most gripping parts, about touring in the provinces, the breakup of her first affair, and the deadly round of bed-sitters in London, cover aspects of her life she had already written about in her novels. What she had not already fixed in her mind by writing had faded. (p. 600)

Unfortunately, her autobiography will serve her ill and win her no new readers…. One's reservations about the fiction—that it is narrow, complaining, its heroines tiresomely self-pitying and vain—are reinforced by the autobiography. The thinness of her thought makes itself apparent, particularly in her treatment of racial tensions in the colonial life of her youth, where the great discovery is that blacks resent whites. Here is no complex historical vision. Here is no understanding of the forces at work in societies to produce victims and oppressors. There are simply victims and oppressors. Her breadth is no more than a recognition that the oppressors mean no harm. Her strength is in recording so vividly the point of view of the victims…. (p. 601)

There may be some acquired tastes, but Jean Rhys, like oysters, you either like immediately or never, and if you do, it is best to sample her infrequently. The taste is specialized. Overindulged in, she cloys. And then too, depression is as hard to bear in fiction as in life. But read with restraint, her novels form an unforgettable part of one's experience. That she has written a bad autobiography should not matter. She wrote her life into existence in her fiction. Her autobiography has little to add. (p. 602)