[In the following appreciative survey of Rhys's works, Alvarez maintains that the "purity of Miss Rhys's style and her ability to be at once deadly serious and offhand make her books peculiarly timeless. " ]

When Jean Rhys published her first book, a collection of short stories called The Left Bank, in 1927, it came with an enthusiastic preface by Ford Madox Ford. He was presumably rather less enthusiastic about her first novel, Quartet, which appeared the next year. It is the story of a young woman, left penniless when her husband is sent to prison, who drifts into an affair with an older man, egged on by his crushingly understanding and emancipated wife. Writing of The Left Bank, Ford had praised his protegée's "passion for stating the case of the underdog." It turned out that the underdog heroine had an uncanny eye for the hypocrisies and secret brutality of those on top and an equal gift for expressing, without dramatics, the pain and confusion of her own condition. Ford himself was the model for the novel's unspeakable Mr. Heidler.

Three more novels followed in the 1930's: After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie in 1930, Voyage in the Dark in 1934, and Good Morning, Midnight in 1939. Then silence. Like one of her heroines, Miss Rhys went to earth, or just went under, and the books went out of print. It was nearly 20 years before she was traced, after the B.B.C, broadcast a dramatized version of Good Morning, Midnight. She was living in Cornwall and had accumulated, in her two decades underground, the extraordinary stories which made up the collection Tigers Are Better-Looking. She was also writing, and compulsively rewriting, another novel, Wide Sargasso Sea, which was finally published in 1966. It is a masterpiece, but so in its different way is Good Morning, Midnight, which had sunk with remarkably little trace. This time, however, Miss Rhys got the recognition she had deserved for so long—though none too soon. She is now 79. . . .

To my mind, she is, quite simply, the best living English novelist. Although her range is narrow, sometimes to the point of obsession, there is no one else now writing who combines such emotional penetration and formal artistry or approaches her unemphatic, unblinking truthfulness. Even the narrowness works to her advantage. She knows every detail of the shabby world she creates, knows precisely how much to leave out—surprisingly much—and precisely how to modulate the utterly personal speaking voice which controls it all, at once casual and poignant, the voice of the loser who refuses, though neither she nor God knows why, to go down. Because of this voice, the first four novels read as a single, continuing work. They have the same heroine—although she goes by different names—the same background of seedy hotels and bedsitters for transients in Montparnasse and Bloomsbury, and they recount the single, persistent, disconnected disaster of a life in which only three things can be relied on: fear, loneliness and the lack of money.

Money, above all, is the permanent anxiety, the spring that moves the plots and people. When the heroines have it, they blow it recklessly on clothes and drink, knowing it won't last, anyway. Without it, they twist like cornered animals and humiliate themselves by begging from contemptuous family or ex-lovers, or by sleeping with men they don't want. When Mr. Mackenzie stops Julia Martin's allowance, blood money to end an affair, she has to face London again and her impoverished, acidly genteel uncle and sister. ("Norah herself was labelled for all to see. She was labelled 'Middle class, no money.'") She drifts into an affair with the not quite spontaneous, vaguely stunted Mr. Horsfield, then out of it again—Mr. Horsfield buys the ticket—back to the familiar demimonde of Paris, with no money, no future and no longer even sure of her looks.

In Good Morning, Midnight, Sasha Jansen is older, already in her forties, and the plot is reversed. She has been holed up in London trying to drink herself to death when she is rescued by a friend and packed off to Paris to recuperate and buy herself clothes. But her Paris is haunted: her baby died there; her marriage broke up; affairs have torn her to shreds. There are bars she can't enter, hotels she daren't pass, and at every moment of inattention the past comes back at her in piercing detail. Her world is unstable and superstitious, as threatening and volatile as nitroglycerin. So she drifts, holding herself in, absurdly prone to tears, until she is picked up by a gigolo who is deceived by her old fur coat into thinking she has money. Together they perform a kind of parody mating dance, at once cynical and anguished, in which each seeks to use the other as an instrument for a revenge on life. They end, of course, more injured than before. But then, what else is possible, since they are both walking wounded?

"'Look,' he says, still speaking in a whisper. He throws his head up. There is a long scar, going across his throat. Now I understand what it means—from ear to ear. A long, thick, white scar. It's strange that I haven't noticed it before.

"He says: That is one. There are others. I have been wounded.'

"It isn't boastful, the way he says this, nor complaining. It's puzzled, puzzled in an impersonal way, as if he is asking me—me, of all people—why, why, why?"

This one question—why?—reverberates all through Miss Rhys's work. She is far too shrewd to try to provide an answer other than the inevitable one: "This happened and then that happened." In other words, that's how things are. She is also far too pure an artist to allow herself the luxury of self-pity. Like the gigolo, she is "puzzled in an impersonal way." So the moments of drama and confrontation—when the subterranean terror and despair seem about to burst through—remain strictly moments, done briefly, without comment or fuss, from the outside. Her mind flicks away from them, quick as a fly, and settles on some small detail off to one side: her makeup is wrong, the light falls oddly, a bell rings, a car hoots, or a cliche comes to life. ("Now I understand what it means—from ear to ear.") And this, as she does it, is far more unnerving than any full-throated howl of anguish could ever be. She is like the girl in the Max Beerbohm story who looks life straight in the face out of the very corners of her eyes.

She is like a Beerbohm heroine in other ways, too. Miss Rhys's apparently autobiographical heroines have been, in their time, chorus girl, mannequin, artist's model, even a part-time prostitute. In other words, they are in the Muse business, the stunning, vulnerable girls who, when Miss Rhys began writing, more usually inspired books than wrote them. At the beginning of Voyage in the Dark the 19-year-old virgin chorus girl is reading Nana; at the end she like Nana, is on the game, but chillingly and without any of Zola's unearned polemic. This makes the world Miss Rhys creates seem strangely unprecedented, glassy clear yet somehow distorted, as though she were looking up at things from the bottom of a deep pool. She makes you realize that almost every other novel, however apparently anarchic, is rooted finally in the respectable world. The authors come to their subjects from a position of strength and with certain intellectual presuppositions, however cunningly suppressed. She, in contrast, has a marvelous artistic intelligence—no detail is superfluous and her poise never falters as she walks her wicked emotional tightrope—yet is absolutely nonintellectual: no axe to grind, no ideas to tout.

She also writes from a position of weakness: as though orphaned, her women have no one to fall back on, no money, no will to get on, and one skin too few to protect them against the endlessly hostile world. Julia Martin, like all the others, is "too vulnerable ever to make a success of a career of chance."

Yet that is the only career she has ever had, drifting from man to man, loan to loan, injury to injury, waiting appalled until her looks finally fail and there is nothing left. In the money or out of it, the heroines have a certain chic, a certain emotional style, but they are never respectable and the middle-class world knows this and treats them accordingly. "If all the good, respectable people had one face," says Julia, "I'd spit in it." But inevitably it is they who end spitting in hers.

Miss Rhys is particularly expert in the chill hypocrisy of the English. "I got the feeling," says a foreigner in one of her postwar stories, "that I was surrounded by a pack of timid tigers waiting to spring the moment anybody is in trouble or hasn't any money. But tigers are better-looking, aren't they?" This sense of being an outsider unwillingly involved in the intricate social games the British play is constant in Miss Rhys's work. Perhaps this is because she spent the first 16 years of her life on the West Indian island of Dominica, where her Welsh father was a doctor, her mother a Creole. The dream of a tropical paradise as irretrievably lost as her innocence haunts Voyage in the Dark. But it was another quarter of a century before she was able to face it head-on.

Wide Sargasso Sea is her only novel to be set in the past and with a heroine not immediately identifiable with the author, except in her being, like all the others, one of those who are defeated as though by natural right. Antoinette Cosway is a 19th-century Creole heiress, inbred, hovering on the border-line between innocence and decadence, at once besotted by her exquisite West Indian island and menaced by it, as her mother has been menaced by their freed slaves and eventually driven out of her mind by them. An Englishman, stone cold and destructive as all Miss Rhys's Englishmen are, marries Antoinette for her dowry, betrays her and glassily drives her mad in her turn. His name is not given, but the book ends at Thornfield Hall, the scene of Jane Eyre. Antoinette, in fact, has become the first Mrs. Rochester, crazy and shut away in an attic, her own tenuous life merely an obstruction to other, sturdier lives, waiting her release by fire.

It is a hallucinatory novel, as detailed, abrupt and undeniable as a dream, and with a dream's weird and irresistible logic. It is also the final triumph of Miss Rhys's stylistic control, her persistent search for a minimal sensuous notation of distaste. Despite the exotic setting and the famous, abused heroine, there is no melodrama. Her prose is reticent, unemphatic, precise, and yet supple, alive with feeling, as though the whole world she so coolly describes were shimmering with foreboding, with a lifetime's knowledge of unease and pain.

The purity of Miss Rhys's style and her ability to be at once deadly serious and offhand make her books peculiarly timeless. Novels she wrote more than 40 years ago still seem contemporary, unlike those of many more popular authors. More important, her voice itself remains young. She was about 30 before she began to write—apparently having other things on her mind before that—yet the voice she created then, and still uses, is oddly youthful: light, clear, alert, casual and disabused, and uniquely concerned in simply telling the truth.