There are two explanations for Jean Rhys's extraordinary obscurity. One is simply the life she lived. (p. 28)

As a literary life it was, one may say, unusual; and it separated her entirely from the centers of literary power, where reputations and careers are made.

The other explanation has to do with her motive for writing. Surely no other modern novelist has been so completely without literary ambition…. "I never wanted to write at all," she said in one interview, "but of course I did discover that if you write you can forget, and so I did it again and again," and in another, "I wrote because it relieved me." This may sound a bit self-dramatizing, but I think it was true—she was one writer who wrote out of private necessity, to exorcise her demons.

One has a strong (and natural) impulse to read her novels simply as one continuous chronicle of a disastrous private life. They are all told from the point of view of a young woman who is always the same young woman, and they follow the line of Jean Rhys's own life, from the Caribbean childhood to the bohemian years in London and Paris, and they include the same disasters—the abortion, the dead child, the affair with Ford. Jean Rhys has encouraged such an autobiographical reading by referring to her heroines, in interviews, as "I."

Yet at the end of her life she expressed annoyance that readers were taking her novels as a direct record of her own miseries, and pitying her because her heroines had such grim times. (pp. 28-9)

[She] was right to protest. Certainly she made her novels out of her own experiences (doesn't everyone?); but they are not autobiographical in the sense of describing an entire life. Rather they turn over, again and again, one human situation—the condition of absolute loneliness. Her heroines have no connections, no hopes, and no will: they float in their lives like ships dead in the water, accepting indifferently the movements of the tides. This was her only subject, and she worked it out with a cold perfection. No doubt there were good times in her life …, but as an artist she could make no use of them. Her myth of existence was made of the bad times. (p. 29)

All these bad times seem to have come pretty directly from Jean Rhys's own early life. But they are not that life; or they are life transformed, and quite self-consciously transformed…. [Since] life has no shape, art is necessary; it provides some shape, at least, to hang on to. To be an artist, then, is a mode of survival.

And certainly Jean Rhys was an artist. Any page of her prose is instantly recognizable; she could write brilliantly from the beginning. Although 27 years separated Voyage in the Dark, the last of her early novels, from Wide Sargasso Sea,… the style is essentially the same—the words plain and truth-telling, but the effect trance-like, like the movements in a dream….

It is the appropriate style for the fictional form that is Jean Rhys's most original achievement: she invented a novel that could do without the common motive power of fiction—a central, propelling will. Her novels are will-less and momentum-less; things happen …, but they aren't willed by anyone. The central consciousness seems displaced, disconnected, entranced, not so much an agent as a spectator of her own defeats, which she reports with a sad and harrowing honesty.

Most of the defeats are at the hands of men, and you can see why Jean Rhys was taken up, when she was rediscovered, by feminists—though I think they misunderstand her (and Jean Rhys thought so, too). The feminist line is that her central characters represent essential female consciousness, victimized by man-dominated society. But it isn't man that the Jean Rhys heroine fears and hates: it's humankind….

[The] novels are not cautionary tales, or polemics; they are simply reports of the way things are. Jean Rhys's heroines embrace their disasters sadly, but they learn nothing from them, and nothing is changed by their pain—because, one must infer, nothing can be changed.

Jean Rhys began to write her autobiography [Smile Please] at the age of 86…. The book is unfinished and fragmentary, a series of short vignettes …; nevertheless it is an extraordinary document—not a mere footnote to the novels, but a marvelous book in its own right. It differs from the novels covering the same ground in being less inward, less extreme in the consciousness that it records, and altogether more cheerful. There are no drinking bouts here, no haunting fears, and no despair. It is, you might say, a more balanced account, making use of the good times that the novels have no room for.

The book is especially fine in its memories of Dominica, her Paradise Lost, the world before her Fall. These episodes have the staring honesty of the novels, but they also contain happiness and tenderness, as well as the soft sadness that stretched-out memory has—it was all so long ago, nothing is left. Nothing.

But you can already see in these early incidents that Rhys heroine beginning to form her passive, isolated identity. She watches life, but never asks questions about it; she becomes good at "blotting things out" by refusing to think about them; she has a vague, persistent feeling that she'll always be lost in the real world, and defeated by it. Later episodes, in London and Paris, add to these feelings her reflections on sex and money, her gradual growing sadness, her fears. By the end, the whole heroine is there, ready to enter the first novel.

The most extraordinary piece in Smile Please is not these memories, though, but a diary that Jean Rhys kept in 1947, when she was living alone in a Maidstone pub…. It is a harsh self-interrogation of her life, her work, and her reasons for doing it; she calls it "The Trial of Jean Rhys." (p. 30)

Jean Rhys is the clearest case I know of a writer who wrote to survive…. All of her work is played on one sad string. That is a definition of a minor writer, and no one would deny that that is the right term for her. But the tunes that she played on that one string are shapely and beautiful and haunting. Now that she has been received into the literary world that she was so indifferent to, I can't think that she will ever be allowed to return to obscurity again. She is one of our classics. (p. 31)