[Jean Rhys's Smile Please: An Unfinished Autobiography, a] slight, initially rich and finally sketchy book is partly an autobiography; partly an attempt to put some of the record straight, after certain rumours about her first husband's honesty and her relationship with Ford Madox Ford; and partly an apologia for her inability to write her 'life' in the conventional sense. Jean Rhys is saying that, having used up her life in her stories, what more can she give, or what more do we need to know?

Unfortunately for her, as for certain other writers, it is the very excellence of the artistic realisation of so much that had happened to her which has given us this no doubt greedy appetite for the raw material which went into it….

Although there is something in Jean Rhys's male-exploited femininity which brings Colette to mind, she was naturally non-autobiographical, and having to put her life in this kind of order when she was in her eighties and often very ill created unusual strain. Had not her friend, the young novelist David Plante, become her amanuensis, and Diana Athill suggested to her how the book could be formed from a series of vignettes which would closely resemble fragments of her fiction in style and treatment, she could never have attempted something so uncongenial. The result is tantalising rather than satisfactory. It is like having in one's hands, for a few minutes only, an album full of strange and absorbing pictures in which one longs to bury one's head for hours.