[In the following essay, Savory traces Rhys's development as a short story writer and describes her revision process.]

I will post you the story tomorrow nearly three weeks too late … Its not right yet, too slow at the start too hurried at the end …

(Letter to Francis Wyndham, 6 March 1961)

I will finish Leaving School & Mr. Ramage A bit sentimental perhaps, and the West Indies as they were sound unreal, but I cant help that.

(Letter to Olwyn Hughes, 25 February 1966)

Yesterday I posted a letter to Diana explaining the corrections I'm anxious to make in ‘Fifi’ and ‘Vienne’. With ‘Fifi’ its just a matter of deleting a few paragraphs but ‘Vienne’ is more complicated.

The chapter headings must go of course and be replaced by spaces but I want some of the ‘chapters’ left out altogether. They are not good & only confuse what story there is.

(Letter to Olywyn Hughes, 7 March 1967)

Rhys's interest in and success with the short story form have been compared favourably with that of other achieved writers, most evidently Hemingway (Brown 1986) and Katherine Mansfield (Wolfe 1980). Her first published text, ‘Vienne’, appeared in Ford's transatlantic review (vol. 2, no. 2, 1924) immediately after Hemingway's ‘Cross-Country Snow’ and in the same issue as an extract from Gertrude Stein's ‘The Making of America’.¹ But whereas the short story has long been marginalised in British literature, often used as a practice run by writers intending to become novelists, in the Caribbean, the literary short story, like its oral counterpart is a major form, especially for women writers. For them, Rhys stands chronologically as a kind of ancestor.

Many Caribbean women writers have excelled in the short story form, including Paule Marshall, Michelle Cliff, Jamaica Kincaid, Olive Senior, Velma Pollard, Pauline Melville, Christine Craig, Alecia McKenzie, Ramabai Espinet and Opal Palmer Adisa.² A number of writers, such as Olive Senior and Velma Pollard, have chosen both the short story and the poem, both genres requiring an ability to exploit the advantages and limitations of economy. Many of the most identifiably Caribbean forms of verbal artistry, such as calypso, require economy and highly developed verbal play which permits a depth of signification without a great many words.³ I have argued that a good deal of Rhys's effectiveness as a writer comes from using such economical but richly layered poetic devices as linked chains of imagery. She constantly worked to eradicate any superfluous words in her texts: the economy of the story form was something she could therefore fully embrace.

Rhys's Caribbean is thematically visible enough in her stories for there to be a collection of them entitled Tales of the Wide Caribbean (ed. Ramchand: n.d.). Ramchand argues that Rhys gradually permitted ‘repressed Caribbean experience’ to emerge more and more forthrightly as her fictional career went on. Less than half of Rhys's published short pieces are included in Ramchand's collection. But Rhys's own vision of the Caribbean is encoded subtly in most of Rhys's shorter texts as important stylistic elements, just as I have argued it is in Rhys's longer fiction.

The direction Rhys took in ‘Let Them Call It Jazz’ (1962; TAB-L [Tigers Are Better-Looking], 1968; CSS [Jean Rhys: The Collected Short Stories], 1987) in using a Creole or nation language speaker as narrator has become predominant in Caribbean writing.⁴ Where locally accented international English is used for narration, nation language is very often essential for dialogue in women's stories, since many portray the dispossessed working woman. Kincaid, Cliff and Marshall portray the ways in which Caribbean speech and cultural identity survive the journey to another culture as a result of migration or are displaced or suppressed by it. Apart from resembling Rhys in her beginnings as an autobiographical short-fiction writer, her early exile and her ambivalence about the Caribbean, Kincaid's style in her early stories is economical and vividly precise in ways which recall Rhys. Rhys's enthusiastic response to hearing from Wally Look Lai (letter to Francis Wyndham, 11 May 1968) that Caribbean writers such as Jan Carew were working together to launch a new literary magazine in Toronto called Cotopaxi, surely means she would have been delighted with the great quantity of extremely good writing which has come from the Caribbean since then.

Rhys tacitly drew on the tradition of story-telling so powerfully evidenced among poor women in the Caribbean in the folk traditions of ‘tim-tim’ and Nancy stories.⁵ Her portrayal of Meta and Francine (Smile Please), clearly reveals Rhys's early connection of black women, Caribbean culture and a sophisticated oral tradition of vibrant, well-formed stories. Most of her stories are told by or on behalf of women who, even when passive, implicitly protest or expose a system which excludes or is indifferent to them. Her narrative complexity in the stories reinforces the difficulty of making oneself heard, or achieving any genuine communication, which, as I have argued earlier, owed something to her Caribbean sense of political, racial and class divisions being almost insurmountable, to which she added an acute sense of the particular marginalisation of women.

However her technique was of course also influenced by Ford, who clearly taught her a good deal about translating rough draft into crafted blocks of words, a process which understood that the process of writing itself supersedes whatever the writing is about. In that sense, Rhys understood from the beginning of her career that she was working words just as a sculptor might work marble or a carver wood. She worked as hard on her stories as on her novels, using the same techniques: drafting in notebooks, then revising and revising. Her letters show a continued concern for achieving the rightness of small details such as names in the stories.⁶ She was also constantly self-critical.⁷

It is clear that a good number of the pieces in Rhys's later story collections are final reworkings of old manuscript material, sometimes from draft intended for novels. ‘Night Out 1925’ (SIOL [Sleep It Off, Lady], 1976) shares a protagonist called Suzy with the unpublished novel ‘Triple Sec’; other examples include ‘Till September Petronella’ (1960; TAB-L, 1968) ‘Vienne’ (first published 1924). ‘Mannequin’, an early story included in The Left Bank [The Left Bank and Other Stories], has a protagonist called Anna: much later Rhys would make an Anna protagonist of Voyage in the Dark. She admitted to Francis Wyndham (27 September 1968) that ‘Overture and Beginners Please’ seemed part of a longer work.

Fortunately, a number of later stories have survived in multiple drafts which enable us to look at least at fairly advanced stages of redrafting and correction. Though some critics have thought that Rhys basically wrote the same story over and over again (Morrell 1979), as Malcolm and Malcolm point out (1996), the narrative variety demonstrated in the short fiction is impressive and extensive, ranging from an objective narrator to much greater subjectivity and the use of narrative devices such as letters. The Malcolms also interestingly suggest that the objective narrators' ‘very reticence about themselves suggests that their own fates somehow parallel those of the characters they depict’ (1996: 6).

In general, we can see from Rhys's surviving drafts and manuscripts that the process of fictionalising, whether in the story, novel, poem or autobiography, generally began for her with something close to diary or memoir and then moved through multiple drafts as she worked towards finishing a piece. She tried to eradicate every superfluity and awkwardness: the process is the same, whether stories are extremely short (‘The Joey Bagstock Smile’, 1977) or fairly long (‘Rapunzel, Rapunzel’, SIOL, 1976; CSS, 1987).

Rhys persistently expressed anxiety about the quality of her work in short fiction, though she was often far too hard on the work. ‘Let Them Call It Jazz’ is one of her finest achievements. She first called it ‘They Thought It Was Jazz’ (L: 184): it seemed to her ‘a bit of a crazy story. For fun’ (L: 184). It was her doubts and self-criticisms which propelled her to revise endlessly. ‘Vienne’, as I discussed earlier, has three clearly different versions. In two unpublished letters written 3 and 6 March 1967 to Diana Athill, as the reprint of ‘Vienne’ in Tigers Are Better-Looking was being planned, Rhys expressed her reservations about the second version, published in The Left Bank. It now seemed to her ‘bitty’; it ‘gives a feeling of untidiness & breathlessness because its in the wrong order’. She wanted the chapter headings left out (they were); she fretted over decisions: omitting certain chapters, trying to capture the feel of Vienna when only trivial things remained in her memory.

Similarly, she wondered if The Left Bank story ‘Illusion’ was good enough for inclusion though ‘it is much how I wrote then’. She thought ‘The Blue Bird’ (TLB [The Left Bank and Other Stories]) sentimental; also ‘some paragraphs of Fifi (TLB) ought to be deleted’.⁸ She wanted ‘Temps Perdi’ (1967; PMS, 1969), one of her strongest stories, left out, because she had ‘leaned on’ it when she came to ‘Part 11 of the book’, presumably Wide Sargasso Sea, and that was because she had written it, or a version of it, whilst visiting the West Indies in the thirties. ‘I Spy a Stranger’ (1966; PMS, 1969) was ‘too disgruntled’, so that was left out also. On 4 April, she wrote again to Athill saying that ‘Tea with an Artist’ (TLB, 1927; TAB-L, 1968) was too sentimental (it was however included). Even after Tigers Are Better-Looking was published, Rhys had reservations, ‘I think MacKenzie is better really’ (letter to Francis Wyndham, 10 April 1970). The late stories cost her effort to complete, which she feared made some of them seem ‘forced and toiled over’ (letter to Francis Wyndham, Thursday 17 July), for she wanted to work on her autobiography.

She also worried about the fact that she mainly wrote about the past by the late sixties. Her stories about war seemed dated to her when she came to try to finish them. She admitted ‘I was haunted by the War you see for quite a long time—only in “Petronella” did I reach farther back and get away’ (letter to Oliver Stoner, 15 September). She was anxious that her vision of the West Indies would seem unreal to readers now. Rhys was always hypercritical of her own work, but especially when it came to the stories.

As if in response to Rhys's own doubts, the stories have been, relative to the novels, critically neglected until very recently though reviews of her three collections of stories were on the whole positive. Reviewers of the later two collections, Tigers Are Better-Looking (1968) and Sleep It Off, Lady (1976) had of course the evidence of her outstanding success with Wide Sargasso Sea.⁹ But as early as 1927, with the appearance of The Left Bank, Rhys's reviewers found her capacity to pare away unnecessary words and produce a sharp, evocative prose style was remarkable.¹⁰ A. Alvarez's celebrated 1974 description of Rhys as the finest living English novelist certainly helped to minimise negative criticism. But even Carole Angier (1990), Rhys's biographer, chose for reasons of space to omit extensive discussion of the short fiction. Only a few critics have chosen to explore Rhys's short fiction in some depth, though there is now a full-length study (Malcolm and Malcolm 1996).¹¹

Rhys paid relatively little attention in her short pieces to plot or character description, often depicting a state of being, often a feeling such as hunger or loneliness. Many of the stylistic effects, on which the success of a Rhys story depends, are exactly those which characterise the longer fiction. As we have seen in earlier chapters, Rhys always wrote economically, even in the novel, often using ellipsis and severe cutting, working with her poet's love of compression and parallelism and her dramatist's capacity for effective and weight-bearing dialogue. She established a semiotics of colour as consistently in the stories as in the novels. Placement, or more often displacement, is as evidently important in the stories as the novels. Very often in a Rhys story, communication must cross not only national boundaries, but those of class and race. There is a good deal of irony and a bitter humour, sometimes combined with an awareness of the spiritual as a source of resistance. Like the novels, the stories often have an evident political theme. As I have argued previously, a good deal of her writerly instincts drew on her own unique Caribbean experience and translated it into an idiosyncratic stylistic identity.

The volume of Rhys's collected stories (ed. Athill 1987) is the best way to see the development of her skill with shorter texts over her writing life.¹²The Left Bank (1927), as I discussed earlier, was the beginning of her achieved writing and is still mainly effective, even if, as Diana Athill comments in her introduction, there are one or two signs of a yet not quite mature style. By looking over the whole of the stories, the issue of Rhys's autobiographical fiction arises from a slightly different point of view. Though, like The Left Bank, Tigers Are Better-Looking (1968) has a good deal of material which is evidently fictionalised but can be traced to Rhys's own experience, six of the sixteen pieces in Sleep It Off, Lady (1976) have a first-person narrator and describe experience known to be Rhys's own, thereby provoking a good many reviewers to comment that the collection is autobiographical.¹³ Carole Angier mines Rhys's later short fiction for biographical material though Rhys never wrote any version of experience which was not fictionalised and subdued and recast for professional reasons.

Towards the end of her life, Rhys was working seriously on her autobiography, and began to change her life-long habit of beginning from her own experience and fictionalising away from it, allowing the demands of her form and style to dictate what content remained and what was excised. Now, she often returned to old fictional drafts for her autobiographical material, or began to move towards what we now call the personal essay, or creative non-fiction, which is the process I will explore in chapter 9. She was herself aware of the risks involved in working so close to life: ‘I think that scraps of obvious autobiography mixed with fiction are bitty’ (letter to Francis Wyndham, 9 July). Most of the stories, of course have a basis in Rhys's personal experience, about which we are much clearer since Angier's research. But in a story, Rhys generally constructed the protection of a very clear narrative distance where she was using an intimate recollection (‘Good-bye Marcus, Goodbye Rose’, SIOL, 1976), or created the illusion of intimacy by giving a story first-person narration. But at times she in effect writes creative non-fiction, or the personal essay, in which the autobiographical element is clearly stated and understood, but also crafted, reinvented, as fictional material. Fiction gave Rhys an opportunity to work through the personal without exposing herself. The way she handled the personal essay allowed her to move ever closer to autobiography without identifying the material as her own life experience. The most evident personal essays I shall discuss with Smile Please in chapter 9, because they are not failed stories, but brave and innovative attempts to find a new fictional voice.

I have two major concerns in discussing the stories: firstly, how Rhys arrived at final drafts, which is evident from her extent notebooks and manuscript versions, and secondly, how her mature stories exhibit her signature stylistic traits, established first in The Left Bank, and which as I have argued in this study are often connected to her Caribbean experience as much or more than her European apprenticeship as a writer.

It is clear from variant drafts of stories that Rhys not only kept a good deal from first draft but also changed the construction of individual sentences over and over again, to get the right flow. She was always concerned with pace as well, with whether a story was too fast or slow in various sections, and it is clear that in the stories, as in the novels, she still heard Ford's advice that when in doubt, cutting would help. At times, she whittled away at the substance of a story until it became a slim fragment, sometimes remarkably effective, as in ‘I Used to Live Here Once’ (SIOL, 1976).

‘Rapunzel, Rapunzel’, one of Rhys's most disturbing late stories about female old age, exists in several typed drafts annotated in a hand not Rhys's, presumably that of a typist of the early 1970s, and although in this case the changes are very small ones, they show Rhys's concern for selecting and marshalling detail.¹⁴ Tracking a few sentences through drafts 3, 5, 7, 8, 9, 10 and the final published version demonstrates the point. Draft 3 is heavily worked over in pen by the typist's hand. It is an early draft which needs to capture the memories for use, and includes a long description of an Indian woman patient, later totally excised because other than in the description of this woman's exquisitely shaped feet which could arguably contribute to the story's theme of the last feminine identities in old, ill women, it is not relevant.

The crisis around which the story is built in final draft is the cutting off of an old woman's lovely long silvery hair by a barber who does not pay attention to her request for the ends to be trimmed. This moment appears in an annotated version (draft 3) as ‘Then to my horror I saw him produce a large pair of scissors. He picked up her hair in one hand. Snip, snip and half of it was lying on the floor.’ In draft 5, the Rapunzel theme is missing, because the scene where the old woman's hair is cut has gone, and what is left is a much less tightly organised essay on a stay in a convalescent home. In draft 7, the scene is back, but the sentences about the cutting process now excise the narrator's feelings, ‘He picked it up in one hand and produced a large pair of scissors. Snip, snip and half of it was lying on the floor.’ This remains unaltered through the remaining drafts, but in the published version, Rhys has added ‘Then’ to the sentence, ‘Then he picked it up …’ Sadly, she omitted from the final version a lovely image of the old woman as mermaid with her long, damp hair, probably finding it too conventional or romantic. She was always concerned to tighten and shorten and to find the best order, but this was in the details, not usually in the grand plan of a story. A paragraph which begins in draft 3 ‘We drove on for about forty minutes’ and ends with ‘We stopped at 2 hospitals on the way to pick up a couple of other patients’ ends in draft 10 as ‘We drove for about forty minutes stopping twice to pick up other patients’, which is the published version.

‘The Stepping Stones’, a draft dated 24 Jan. 1974, which became ‘I Used to Live Here Once’ (SIOL, 1976) shows the same attention to detail. A sentence beginning ‘The only thing was that the sky had a glassy kind of look that she didn't quite remember’ became ‘The only thing was that the sky had a glassy look that she didn't remember’ (SIOL: 175). Rhys's excision of all unnecessary ambiguities from her prose makes her extremely good at the very short, one- or two-page piece like this, but this of course is the kind of attention to crafting a sentence which made Wide Sargasso Sea so long in the final completion process but so perfectly finished that it remains a major example of a writer's fine craft.

The story ‘Goodbye Marcus, Goodbye Rose’, (SIOL, 1976) which is Rhys's only direct fictionalised version of the Mr. Howard incident, began as a story called ‘The Birthday’. Comparison of these drafts shows how Rhys worked when the autobiographical material which was source for the story was particularly emotionally intense and difficult. The draft ‘The Birthday’ begins with Phoebe waking on her thirteenth birthday. The first part of the story contains material which would be reworked in later texts, such as Wide Sargasso Sea and Smile Please. After Phoebe's attempt to feel good about herself, which includes putting a rose behind her ear, and her English aunt and father's comments about her as a ‘regular little creole’, like her Spanish grandmother, she remembers meeting an old man who claims to be an ex-slave from her family's estate: ‘With winks and leers and senile chuckles he began to hint at, to describe in his primitive way, God knew what scenes of lust and cruelty …’ (undated draft, UTC, p. 3). This is the pivot of the story, which then goes on to describe a young ‘brown’ girl from Martinique with whom Phoebe is friendly and whom she sees as ‘a part of all the beauty … the blue of the sky and the crimson of a hibiscus against the blue the rustle of palm leaves in the evening and the mystery of a tom tom beating very far off, the heavy scent of certain flowers’ (p. 5). The rather lurid, colonial construction of both the child and the landscape reveal that Rhys was right to restrain, by cutting, her desire to overly dramatise and stereotype the Caribbean. The final phase of the draft has to do with Mr. Howard, the visit to the Botanical Gardens and his touching of her breast: this is the emotional core of the story. Rhys's tendency to laconic statement, even understatement, and her rigorous exclusion of anything which might be considered sentimental makes those stories built of something truly powerful and alarming, like this kind of sexual assault, work much better than those built on something more trivial, where the kind of emotionally intense narrative which Rhys did not allow in her work would have substituted for lack of dramatic elements in the plot. For example, though some critics think ‘Till September Petronella’ one of Rhys's best stories, I find it tepid precisely because the narrator is so distanced from emotional involvement and the characters are all emotionally inert, yet the only action is their relationships with each other.¹⁵

Clearly the source for ‘The Birthday’ was a good deal of different childhood experiences combined, but by the time the story had become ‘The Game and the Candle’ (of which there are two extant drafts) Rhys had worked out a structure for the story. The second version begins with a Captain Cardo singing. This old man is a former war hero. He takes Phoebe to the Botanical Gardens, where he touches her breast.¹⁶ But this time the story elaborates more, for the Captain talks ceaselessly of love, ‘horrible, frightening and fascinating talk’ (UTC, p. 4). The title of the story comes from the Captain's wife who makes a comment to her husband, ‘Do you think the game is worth the candle?’ The story ends with Phoebe's internalisation of guilt, and her acceptance of the fact that her dream of a virtuous future, with children called Jack, Marcus and Rose, is now over, and a ‘difficult and uncertain but far more exciting future’ lies ahead.

There are two drafts of the version titled ‘Good-bye Marcus, Good-bye Rose’, which reorder elements from the earlier drafts as Rhys worked towards a line for the story which would make it coherent and tightly organised. The change of title neatly alters the focus from the Captain and his wife to the effect of the incident on Phoebe. By omitting Phoebe's birthday, her friendship with Tite Francine and her encounter with the old ex-slave, Rhys gives the story a narrow focus which then draws her closer into the Mr. Howard narrative. Indeed she mined this for details such as Phoebe's self-flagellation. It is as if the various drafts were necessary stages by which Rhys was able to come closer to her experience whilst being able to retain the distance which enabled her to craft the writing. It is also interesting that the story was not finished until late in Rhys's career, when she had the will to add into it reference to Howard's sado-masochistic narratives which caused the real damage to her emotional development.

If working through variant drafts not only helped Rhys tighten a story but also find its lean lines, its true shape under the flab of too much detail in the early states, stories also helped Rhys establish her style, as I argued in chapter 3, and to practise it in the years between novels, especially during the long drought in her work from 1939-1966. ‘The Blue Bird’ is a mysterious and disturbing early story (TLB, 1927; CSS, 1987) which is set in Paris. Rhys's capacity to observe acutely and to bring a scene to life with small but vivid touches of colour is very evident here, ‘The unpainted faces looked bald and unfinished, the painted—ochre powder, shadowed eyelids, purple lips—were like cruel stains in the sunlight’ (CSS: 60). The details of a painter's palette applied to people, creating a scene through visual contrasts, are even more marked in Rhys's mature work. The next paragraph brings colour as race jarringly and yet whimsically into the narrative:

In the corner, to redeem humanity, sat one lovely creature, her face framed by a silver turban. Wisps of wooly hair peeped out from beneath it—a nigger—what a pity. Why a pity?

One becomes impressionistic to excess after the third kummel!

(CSS: 60)

This is the only beautiful woman in the bar. Rhys establishes that first and so the brutality of having her loveliness caught within a racist term of abuse is intended to shock. This silent woman plays no more part in the story but there is here a latent presence of a Caribbean sensibility about race.

Rhys uses a good deal of dialogue, always her preference over action for conveying character. Her signature use of the careless ways in which Europeans drop the name of God or the devil is also already here, though it will be used in a more developed way, as we have seen, in Good Morning, Midnight. In ‘The Blue Bird’ such usage, ‘Oh, thank God, thank God, it's hot’ (CSS: 61), ‘you poor devil of a blind and infatuated creature’ (CSS: 62), ‘It's funny, sometimes a devil talks with one's tongue’ (CSS: 64), ‘Oh, God, what a fool I was’ (CSS: 64) is taken out of the possibility of being merely empty phrases by the shock of Carlo's story.

Carlo appears fairly quiet, ‘such a nice woman really’ (CSS: 61), but she wears a touch of red, a hat, which as we have seen earlier signifies some hidden passion in a Rhys character. She is an outsider in England, having ‘lived so long in hot places and wasn't quite English to start with’ (CSS: 62). She is the Rhys woman here, and it is her story which has the death-wish component which Rhys's female protagonists almost always experience. Her past includes a ‘Bad Man’ called Paul, and she tells the narrator how he took her into the forest near Barbizon and told him it would be wonderful to die, since she was so happy for that moment. He took her seriously and offered to help her to do so. Now she bitterly regrets that lost chance, ‘To have been so close to a sweet death and to have pushed it away’ (CSS: 64). Paul killed himself anyway, since he was in trouble with the police. In the context of what the narrator calls ‘the Sufferers, white-faced and tragic of eye’ (CSS: 61), denizens of Montparnasse who pour ‘out their souls’, and expose ‘them hopefully for sale’, Carlo's story is particularly poignant.

Her complexity of character is set out in physical descriptions, another Rhys stylistic trait. She is ‘a mass of contradictions. Her voice is as deep as a man's; her shoulders and hips as narrow as those of a fragile school-girl; her eyes brown and faithful like a dog's (hence her name)’ (CSS: 60). She even has the little black dress which so many Rhys protagonists favour, and her ‘Bad Man’ has a very white face and takes her into the forest, both components of later Rhys characters' lives in various versions and combinations.¹⁷

Although this story does not use different languages or registers of a language to indicate the difficulties of communication, unlike so many of Rhys's texts, the poetic coding of detail here conveys to the perceptive reader that surface meaning can be a disguise or deflection. Rhys's stories often tease the reader by this kind of subtle masking. Her stories are somewhat in disguise at times: her characters are also forced at times into public faces which betray their inner complexity.

The reader's sense of trying to read through conflicting evidence or to be able to understand the difference between lies and truth is the whole point of the very short piece ‘Trio’ (TLB, 1927; CSS, 1987) which Howells (1991) and Raiskin (1996) have both rightly seen as a mysterious and sinister portrayal of an apparent Antillean family group in a Montparnasse restaurant in which however the ‘daughter’ appears to have a flirtatious relationship with the ‘father’ and there is no guarantee that she isn't being exploited sexually and economically by both ‘parents’. The ambiguity in this story may be related to Rhys's early desire to deal with the Caribbean only obliquely. Ramchand makes an interesting point in his introduction (n.d.) to Rhys's Caribbean stories: he says as Rhys matured as a writer, she tended less to have a ‘peripheral but normative Black’ and gave Caribbean fragments to her protagonists (but of course she also created Christophine and Selina, who are black women who speak for themselves, Selina much more than Christophine).

Rhys's Caribbean stories are frequently about racial and cultural self-constructions and collisions in the colonial period. In ‘Pioneers, Oh Pioneers’ (SIOL, 1976; CSS, 1987), the eccentric Mr. Ramage who keeps himself apart from white colonial Roseau finally marries a coloured woman and retreats to isolation on a forested property on the Imperial Road, Hesketh Bell's experiment in attracting young Englishmen to develop Dominica. There he appears to have gone mad, at least appearing to a couple in the forest totally naked. Finally he is found evidently having committed suicide, though the rumours that he killed his wife prove unfounded. Ramage's very resistance to both his own racial constituency in Roseau and to general local social convention proves self-destructive.

The core of the story was what Rhys herself described as a ‘Dominican legend’ (letter to Sonia Orwell, 1 May 1968, UTC). The effect of any retold story lies in the mode of its retelling, in this case in Rhys's manipulation of points of view. The story is told as a composite of points of view and bits of information offered by Rosalie, the little girl who admires him; her father and mother; a passenger on the boat from Barbados with him; his neighbours in the forest; people who go up to throw stones at Ramage's house; his wife. These elements of mystery and colliding narratives, telling a story of violation of codes of propriety and ensuing personal threat are very important to Rhys's construction of story after story. It is evident from a series of letters to Francis Wyndham (1975) that Rhys thought this story difficult to write, especially with regard to point of view. Judith Kegan Gardiner (1989), who regards Rhys as an undervalued ‘master of the twentieth-century short story’ (1989: 19), finds that in the later fiction, ‘the disparity between texts and truth, language and experience becomes a dominant theme that the narrative voice dramatizes as well as reports’ (1989: 44). A character called Jimmy Longa is referred to at the beginning of the story. He returns as the major figure in ‘Fishy Waters’ (SIOL, 1976; CSS, 1987) based on another Dominican incident. In this case, multiple narratives are managed partly through letters, a strategy Rhys used as early as ‘Again the Antilles’ (TLB, 1927; TAB-L, 1968; CSS, 1987) and which was clearly in her mind for this story from the earliest drafts, to judge from the Red Exercise Book.¹⁸

Longa, working-class, British, a socialist, offends white colonial Roseau much as Mr. Ramage does, essentially by refusing to live by the racial and class codes of separation and hierarchy: he settled in the black community in Roseau. The issue the story is built around is an accusation that Longa assaulted a little black girl whilst he was drunk, but the story suggests from the beginning that this is a case where social prejudices are involved, and eventually it becomes clear that white, middle-class Matt Penrice, witness against Longa, is the reader's prime suspect.

It is this ability to play with points of view, at root learned out of Rhys's Caribbean childhood and time in Europe, which makes her stories successful. In ‘La Grosse Fifi’ (TLB, 1927; TAB-L, 1968; CSS, 1987), the story is told for maximum effect by Roseau, who has her own experiences to tell and who can only guess as to the last moments of her friend. In the late story, ‘Sleep It Off, Lady’ (1976), an old lady's fondness for the bottle leads to her being scorned and abandoned when she needs help. Thought of a mysterious rat scares Miss Verney to death, in effect, and the switch of narrative focus from her thoughts to an objective narrator's account of her lying dead gives a slight but definite sense of menace and mystery to the short piece.

But the most important of Rhys's Caribbean stories is set in London, ‘Let Them Call It Jazz’ (1962; TAB-L, 1968; CSS, 1987) and it demonstrates all of Rhys's most evident stylistic identities in relation to a portrayal of an exiled West Indian woman. Rhys creates a very natural if generic and exiled West Indian voice for Selina, proving her memory of West Indian speech acute over decades of separation. Ramchand comments that Selina's voice is done in ‘remarkable and convincing dialect’ because of Rhys's ‘memory … of … West Indian society and speech pattern’ (n.d.: n.p.). Rhys's achievement of this voice is the more impressive because of her isolation. Contemporary Guyanese story writer Pauline Melville differentiates brilliantly between the different West Indian voices of London, but she is a contemporary writer and part of the strong presence which West Indian culture has established in Britain now.¹⁹

Rhys evidently found Selina's voice quickly, as is proved by a scrap of surviving early draft of this story, with three alternative titles, ‘They Thought It Was Jazz’, ‘Holloway Song’ and ‘Selina’: ‘I hear the place very old. It take up too much room, so its going to be pulled down and destroyed. Meantime it make all the other houses in that street look cheap trash’ (‘They Thought It Was Jazz’, UTC): this survived in some form in the final draft, though rearranged and sometimes rewritten.

Most importantly, the voice is confident from the moment the published story begins, ‘I have trouble with my Notting Hill landlord because he ask for a month's rent in advance’ (CSS: 158): it locates the character, culturally and politically. It is not only in the verb tenses and certain constructions of sentences that Rhys captures a West Indian intonation, but in the use of certain phrases and words, ‘She too cunning’ (CSS: 158); ‘tired to my bones’ (CSS: 159); ‘it have style’ (CSS: 160); ‘[t]oo besides’ (CSS: 170). One or two aspects of Selina's language suggest Dominica specifically, or at least a place where both French and English patois is spoken, as in ‘a dam' fouti liar’ (CSS: 167) and ‘doudou’ (French patois for sweetheart, dear), or when Selina says ‘It sound good in Martinique patois too: “Sans honte”’ (CSS: 168). Judith Raiskin observes that the voice is ‘a Caribbean English distinct from the voice of Rhys's white Creole narrators’ (1996: 157).

Rhys was anxious in case this story should be read as autobiography if she asked a typist in her locality to work on it. She had after all been in Holloway herself. She was willing to joke about it to her friend Peggy Kirkaldy, ‘my career's been a little stormy & it all ended up in Holloway. Yes dearie—am now a distinguished Old Hollowayian’ (letter, Friday 1949).²⁰ But she was not happy that hostile people in the village might get hold of something to hurt her with. She therefore asked her daughter Maryvonne to type the story (L: 187).

Carrera Suarez and Alvarez Lopez (1990) see Selina Davis and Antoinette Cosway as sharing significant experience and psychological response. In the sense that Antoinette finally does seem to move towards action, confused as it is, by the end of Rhys's telling of her story, she does share with Selina an ability to confront oppression in risky and ultimately self-destructive ways. But the story mainly captures a specific moment in 1950s England when West Indian immigrants were beginning to establish homes in a largely resistant, exploitative or indifferent place: displacement is an important theme in this story. Both Raiskin (1996) and Thomas (1994) stress the historical accuracy and resonance of Rhys's story. Thomas argues it is a portrait of an England beginning to have to come to terms with the frustrations of both women and a newly immigrant Caribbean population, marginalised economically and racially. Rhys's general historical accuracy is affirmed by Gregg (1995): Thomas finds it also in ‘The Insect World’ (SIOL, 1976) and ‘Heat’ (SIOL, 1976).

Many of Rhys's stories, including this one, demonstrate the same complex relation of stylistic identities as the longer fiction. Colours matter: the neighbour's window in the story is stained glass, ‘green and purple and yellow’, a tiny detail but important because Rhys protagonists respond to combinations of primary or jewel colours. Here, as elsewhere in Rhys's texts, tiny touches of colour are very important, such as the red flowers which are the only aspect of nature to ‘stand up to that light’ (CSS: 161) the glare of the English summer, strong sunlight diffused through cloud; the ‘dusty pink dress’ which Selina buys her quieter, post-Holloway self with the little money she gets from her ‘Holloway Song’. This she heard sung in prison and gave it to a jazz pianist to use himself: he pays her a little money. Important textual reference to songs is another Rhys hallmark. Characteristic Rhys play on the language of religion, ‘Satan don't lie worse’ (CSS: 158); ‘dam' English thief’ (CSS: 165), ‘the little devil’ (CSS: 161) is common in this story. It indicates both common speech in Britain in the post-war period and also Selina's serious sense of moral codes.

Even where there is no evidence of an explicit Caribbean presence, the apparently modernist experimentation with narrative voice which marks some stories can also be read as informed by Rhys's Caribbean sense of complexity and displacement. ‘I Spy a Stranger’ (1966; PMS, 1969; CSS, 1987), like many of Rhys's stories, tells only a tantalising fragment of a life-story, and centres around a moment of interaction between a few people. Casey (1974a) argues that Laura is different from Rhys's earlier protagonists in consciously abandoning ‘almost all human contact’ (1974a: 267). Rhys makes a private joke of her own when she provides a misogynist neighbour of Laura's landlady with a dog named ‘Brontë’ which he pretends to kick saying ‘Here's Emily Brontë or my pet aversion’ (Casey 1974a: 268). The story constructs both desirability and danger in women attempting independence. It is also about the necessary dangers and difficulties of being transnational, and in this sense once more returns to a common theme of Caribbean literature, that is, exile, and a central theme of Rhys, i.e. the relation between human social placement and place as landscape or locale.

This story demonstrates again her characteristic stylistic motifs. Roses act as a connective code: Mrs. Hudson's, small and flame-coloured, are the touch of red which usually signifies some important but suppressed emotion in a Rhys character, though in this case, it is not Mrs. Hudson but her guest Laura who gives the roses her empathy and constructs for them a rather human character:

… growing four or five on a stalk, each with a bud ready to replace it. Every time an army lorry passed they shivered. They started shivering before you could see the lorry or even hear it, she noticed. But they were strong; hardened by the east coast wind they looked as if they would last for ever. Against the blue sky they were a fierce, defiant colour, a dazzling colour.

(CSS: 242)

Bright colours are associated with Laura later on, when her stuff is piled on the floor of her room for her to pack and Mrs. Hudson sees it includes ‘reels of coloured cotton’ (CSS: 251). Italicised presumably to indicate Laura's own thoughts, there follows a list which includes an inkstand with violets on it, silk scarves in red, blue, brown, purple, a green box for jewellery, a gold key, a bracelet which looks like a stained glass window, an old flowered workbox with coloured cotton reels and a blue envelope with red chalk writing on it. When, finally, Mrs. Hudson's household evicts Laura, struggling, she suddenly turns to the roses, and says ‘One forgets the roses—always a mistake’ (CSS: 254). Like the roses, Laura is both apparently dotty and fragile and actually extremely enduring.

Multivalent language in this story is involved with the multiple consciousnesses involved in its telling, specifically Mrs. Hudson, her sister-in-law Mrs. Trant and Laura, as well as the anonymous writer of the hostile letter to Mrs. Hudson about Laura. Like many of Rhys's texts, this one constructs the English as unwelcoming, suspicious and, this being the war, endemically hostile to foreigners or anyone a little unusual. The anonymous letter refers to Laura as ‘that witch of Prague’ (CSS: 242). The narrative includes both oral testimony and written documents (the letter and Laura's journal). Though everyone in this story speaks English and a similar sort of English, Laura in her fierce suspicion of the English is apart, ‘This Anglo-German love-hate affair’ (CSS: 244). The villagers have found out that Laura ‘lived abroad a long time and that when you had to leave—Central Europe, you went to France. They say you only came home when you were forced to …’ (CSS: 244).

This construction of insider-outsider is also familiar from Rhys's novels: here it is the woman writer who is outsider. Rhys identified few characters as writers. Interestingly, Mrs. Hudson exclaims in exasperation that Laura left ‘the wretched book lying about’, just as in Smile Please, there is a line in ‘From a Diary’ where the narrator hears a voice telling her ‘be damned careful not to leave this book about’ (SP: 133).

The fascinating ‘Temps Perdi’ (1967; PMS, 1969; CSS, 1987) takes narrative complexity a stage further: it was also partially first drafted whilst Rhys was on her visit to the Caribbean in 1936, and is informed by that reconnection.²¹ Structural unity is sustained by the use of a first-person narrator's recollections. Rhys's short fiction style is generally fairly terse but here the voice is very evidently so: the tension between reticence and disclosing in the narrative voice is of the strength of a character.

Place and placement are important in this story which was released by Rhys not long after Wide Sargasso Sea. The house is a blank canvas, neither ugly nor ‘beautiful, impulsive, impetuous or generous’ (CSS: 256). It does have traces of an ordered garden now gone to seed, some ‘sad flowers’, as well as the remains of a border of lavender by a gravel path. The army is in residence in the two houses nearby for the duration of the war, and so even the four bathrooms in different colours in one of them, pink, black, green and blue, will not last long. The narrator thinks ‘This is the time of smash and grab’ (CSS: 256) and that the bathrooms are the result of ‘Some poor devil—or rich devil or stupid devil’ trying hard with the house. Rhys has then established in a few paragraphs not only the first setting for the story but her characteristic codes of colour and of metaphysical language, a strongly opinionated narrative voice and a sense of fatalism, ‘Death brings its own anaesthetic, or so they say’, ‘I thought there wasn't a living soul there …’ (CSS: 256).

Like many other Rhys stories this one is more significant for its portrayal of a state of emotion, thoughtfully examined, than for plot. The narrator describes her delight in the snow falling, and remembers how her first sight of it was ‘the only thing in England that hadn't disappointed me’—a strong suggestion that the narrator is from somewhere else, somewhere tropical, in short that there is a Caribbean subtext even in this first section of the story. It is important that the narrator is ‘almost as wary of books’ as of people, because they ‘can tell lies’ (CSS: 257). In a passage which recalls Antoinette's separation from the Caribbean and her transportation to Europe (‘Temps Perdi’ was first published in 1967, not long after Wide Sargasso Sea), the narrator expresses her hostility to England. She quotes from one of the very few books which does not try to overbearingly draw her into English culture:

‘… to conduct the transposition of souls of the dead to the White Island, in the manner just described. The White Island is occasionally also called Brea or Britannia. Does this perhaps refer to White Albion, to the chalky cliffs of the English coast? It would be a very humorous idea if England was designated as the land of the dead … as hell. In such a form, in truth, England has appeared to many a stranger.’

(CSS: 257)

This old English house belonged to an English public school-master and thus is deeply associated with the heartland of Empire, specifically those educational institutions which trained young boys to be the servants of colonialism and to promulgate their own social power. The piano, which might have been the vehicle for the narrator's creative energy to be expressed, is out of tune and ghostly and complains ‘like a hurt animal’ when she plays it (CSS: 258). Here the first explicit mention of the Caribbean occurs, when the narrator finds playing on the old piano leads her back in memory through a particular song to relive the circus visiting her small Caribbean island. A lovely girl Nina on the trapeze is like a gold and black butterfly, the insect used here as a symbol of escape from convention.²²

Like many other middle-class houses in Rhys texts, this house has a distinctly hostile and supercilious identity, watching the narrator ‘haughtily’, hiding its ‘hate’ under the same kind of ‘beige mask’ which English people wear, ‘for all here is beige that can be beige, paint, carpets, curtains, upholstery, bedspreads. Everything wears this neutral mask—the village, the people, the sky, even the trees have not escaped’ (CSS: 260). Like other Rhys protagonists, this narrator describes her room in detail, including the important detail of a looking-glass, so often significant in a Rhys text. This time the mirror is cheap and ‘won't stay put’ (CSS: 260). It is putting bolsters along the window-sills to keep out the cold, just as she used to do in Vienna years before, which takes the narrator back in time to a younger self in ‘my new black dress’ and the smell of lilac, both details characteristic of a Rhys narrative, a woman's memory of clothes, especially of the little black dress which haunts so many Rhys women, and of isolated, rare moments of sensuous pleasure.

This transition is sustained in the formally differentiated second section which constructs Vienna and the time of Jean Lenglet's work with the Allied Commission, here called the Japanese Commission. Rhys was able here to recycle, as she so often did, different drafts into a new combination. Here the tone is close to that of the personal essay.²³ Rhys, as usual, connected apparently disparate sections of narrative by motifs, as in poetry. For example, the narrator speaks of the ‘Japanese mask’ dropping, as the Japanese became more animated and sociable after a drinking session and were willing to exchange confidences with the Europeans. Characters have some of the same linguistic habits as characters in other Rhys texts, such as moving in and out of English, and speaking of ‘The poor devil’, enough to link this story with others and with the novels.

The final passage of this section describes the narrator's clothes and the narrative first-person voice becomes more intimately personal: ‘I had a striped taffeta dress, with velvet flowers tucked into the tight waistband’ (CSS: 266): Angier (1990) uses this as autobiography.²⁴ This passage is quite important here as it runs into the ‘Carib Quarter’ section which follows and acts as a link between the memories of young womanhood and memories of the visit to Dominica which Rhys made in her mid-forties, thirty years after leaving the island. Rhys uses touches of colour to good effect: the ‘coloured stones imitating a necklace’ on a white satin dress, the green border on the three flounces on a black dress and its green sash, the white and blue muslin and the blue serge dresses with sleeves embroidered in gay colours with a tassel, the yellow and blue dress for lounging in which reminds the narrator of cornfields and sky. The narrator's dislike of England and the English is present even here, for she hates her English outfit. Casey (1974) points out that Englishmen are elided in Rhys's texts about world war with Germans and Japanese men as brutal and unfeeling oppressors or vandals. For the narrator in ‘Temps Perdi’ good memories are a refuge away from the cold and dark days in the house she dislikes and which she imagines disapproves of her. When she emerges into that hated climate, she will be ‘a savage person—a real Carib’ (CSS: 267).

It is this kind of linking device which fashions a group of separated memories into a workable story: the narrator, inhabited by the spirit of the Caribs, remembers a visit to Temps Perdi, an estate near to the part of Dominica where the Caribs live. The narrator explains that in Creole patois, ‘temps perdi’ means wasted time, and that ‘this island’, which is clearly Dominica, was said to resist human beings. Human effort and labour are constantly undermined by the climate or some natural scourge of a crop. What is impressive here, as in the description of the Coulibri garden in Wide Sargasso Sea, is the overgrown lushness of the island. The natural world fights back here against so-called civilisation: Charlie, the young guide, is entrapped by ‘hideous, heavy boots’ which he takes off after he has trouble with them in a river. The horses are thin and miserable, ‘morose, obstinate’, because, the narrator thinks, this is the ‘price of survival in hostile surroundings’ (CSS: 271). A flamboyant tree, which Rhys especially loved, is just beginning to blossom and the narrator knows she will miss its full glory since she must soon return to England. This though makes her ‘giddy and sick’ (CSS: 271). At this moment, it is a figure of a Carib girl as illustration in an old book which comes to mind, vividly and in detail.²⁵

Rhys's fictional world as a whole maps the generalities of colonial power and post-colonial resistance, of male domination and female subversion, of the actualities of the West Indian history and the complex relation of colony to metropole as Thomas (1996a) has especially noted. The story of a lovely Carib girl who could not walk, and who the narrator thinks is more Creole than pure Carib, is itself a kind of allegory of the ways in which modern people are powerfully formed by the running together of cultural currents, often involving coercion and violence. The girl's mother looks Chinese and was working in service in Martinique before being ‘taken to Paris’, the phrase being very significant, for the allusions earlier in this piece are to those who have been taken in some way or another away from their primary affiliations. But the narrator thinks, whilst in the Carib Quarter, ‘I am home, where the earth is sometimes red and sometimes black’ (CSS: 274): home where she and her childhood friends would write on a plant similar to aloe and where now ‘some up-to-the minute Negro’ writes a bolder message. Time passing changes everything: home finally exists in memory, in the conception of attachment which a person maintains.

But in the narrator's desire to be ‘a real Carib’, in her treasuring the ‘lovely sound’ of the horses hooves in water, a memory separated from the present by ‘so many damnable years’ (CSS: 271), Rhys also reflects a late Romantic opposition of wild, free nature with corrupt and oppressive civilisation, the implication that the written word is suspect and it is safer to keep an oral language secret as the Carib women are said to do. Landscape becomes a trope for the narrator's emotional state. After the description of the ‘brown girl, crowned with flowers’ (CSS: 271), which the narrator remembers from ‘the book about the Caribs’, she drifts into a day-dream:

In the midst of this dream, riding through a desolate, arid, lizard-ridden country, different and set apart from the island I knew, I was still sensitive to the opinion of strangers and dreaded hostile criticism. But no, it was approved of, more or less. ‘Beautiful, open, park-like country. But what an extreme green!’

(CSS: 271)

The voice which resists the intensity of lush tropical vegetation in the sun may have been loosely based on Rhys's husband's response to Dominica.²⁶ It clearly also is the attitude Antoinette's husband is given in Wide Sargasso Sea. The narrator dreams of a different, arid country, hoping to avoid criticism, perhaps because criticism from a close companion makes a desert of the lush and loved emotional landscape. Rhys's fiction does brilliantly and quite before its time expose the grim scaffolding of oppressions and denials which supported British imperial culture and it also explores, even more extraordinarily, the compromises which explain the victims' participation in their own defeats. ‘Temps Perdi’ is not a story about a victim but about a complex consciousness which reads itself as much as it reads the hostile elements of the world.

Rhys's stories are remarkable also because her confinement to the arena of personal experience meant that she constructed voices ranging from youthful inexperience (‘Vienne’), to old and weary age (‘Rapunzel, Rapunzel’), something easily seen in the Collected Short Stories [Jean Rhys: The Collected Short Stories]. Her stories about old age are devastatingly honest. ‘Sleep It Off, Lady’ is a horrific commentary on the fact that old ladies are not often regarded as dear and acceptable but rather as unpleasant and deserving of indifference or worse. ‘I Used to Live Here Once’, in using the ghost image, manages in a page and a half to convey the devastating idea that once dead, a person is entirely forgotten, unable to communicate what their idea of a given place used to be: only occupation in present time is real. In this collection, Rhys weaves her Caribbean and early European past with her wartime memories.²⁷

A good part of Rhys's effect in these stories, as in her longer fiction, is the economical manipulation of emotional complexity: humour, irony, pathos and anger by turns inform narratives which twist and turn according to the unresolvable tensions at the heart of a single consciousness. By paring emotional complexity down to its core, Rhys found a language and a form in the short story which served her very well.

In this she found a language which was essentially poetic, though she always, in her committed work, chose prose. The lean imagery of ‘Sleep It Off, Lady’, the title story in her 1976 collection, is horrifically effective. The huge rat which manifests itself in Miss Verney's imagination is just as ordinary as the block of marble which falls mysteriously into the Commandant's apartment in ‘A Spiritualist’—and just as disturbingly in touch with our deepest anxieties about age, helplessness, death or revenge.

From the beginning to the end of her writing career, Rhys understood how to pare down a story to its acutely striking bones in terms of plot, and to fuse this with the vividness of difficult emotional states. The stories therefore deserve to be read in their own light, not as rehearsals for the novels, although because of their subject matter and their characteristic Rhys style, they are also clearly part of the Rhys canon and benefit eventually from being read in that context also.

Notes

1. She arrived at first publication in the company of major literary figures, an amazing piece of good fortune, but also her work stands well beside theirs.

2. The majority of this work dates from the 1980s, clearly benefitting from not only the post-colonial cultural climate but from the Caribbean women's movement.

3. It is tempting to suggest that there is an ancestral relationship with African languages behind these forms, since tonal languages can play with signification in highly complex and inventive ways whilst being very economical.

4. ‘Nation language’ is Kamau Brathwaite's evocative term for each of the Creoles which are spoken in different Caribbean territories. See History of the Voice (1984).

5. Rhys acknowledged the ritual opening of a Caribbean folk tale in Smile Please: ‘Francine would say “Tim-Tim”. I had to answer “Boissêche”, then she'd say, “Tablier Madame est derrìere dos”’ (SP: 23). Later, Rhys discovered Boissêche is one of the gods worshipped in obeah. Anancy stories crossed the ocean from the Ashanti culture of what is now Ghana and became ‘Nancy stories’ in the Caribbean. MacDonald-Smythe (1997) compares the narrator's opening ritual address and the audience response at the beginning of stories in St Lucia, Trinidad and the Bahamas, and mentions Rattray's excellent bilingual version of the original Anancy stories, Akan-Ashanti Folktales (1930) as containing a formal narrative opening addressed to the audience.

6. In a letter to Francis Wyndham (8 July 1959), Rhys notes the need to find a new name for a character in ‘Till September Petronella’ as the name she chose for her original draft is too close to her present married name of Hamer. She likes the idea of Marston (which she used in the final version), but wants some reassurance as to whether this is a good name for a painter.

7. Even after the Alvarez article in 1974, which praised her highly, Rhys wrote to Oliver Stoner (16 August 1974) that she had written a number of stories ‘of varying merit’. She wrote him on 29 July (no year) that ‘Rapunzel Rapunzel’ was not quite to her liking, and again on 15 September (no year) that the stories were to be published in October (as Sleep It Off, Lady, 1976), but that she thought ‘only a few are any good’. Ironically, given her own early exercises in translation, she found the French edition of Tigers Are Better-Looking better than her own original (letter to Oliver Stoner, 3 November 1969). But her judgement was often right: she would keep a story for years, considering it inferior or unfinished and we have one draft manuscript ‘Chinese Vases’ (UTC) which is an example of a piece which was never finished: it has the hallmarks of a Rhys text, but is indeed not up to her usual standard. It was based on a difficult experience of needing to sell two Chinese vases supposedly brought by Max Hamer, her husband, from China (letter written to Peggy Kirkaldy, 28 May 1950). The sale was necessary because of Max's conviction for fraud. The draft manuscript story is dated 20 March 1974. However it is important to bear in mind that Rhys even thought she'd ‘slipped up’ at the end of Wide Sargasso Sea (letter to Diana Athill, 3 January 1967): in that case she was certainly wrong.

8. Rhys was seventy-eight when Tigers Are Better-Looking was published but had lost none of her stylistic perfectionism. Her correction lists for ‘La Grosse Fifi’ and ‘Vienne’ run to four pages: they note tiny flaws she wanted eradicated, like the word ‘bulging’ because it was used too often.

9. Bailey commented that Rhys is unsentimental, a detached artist who denies herself any indulgences, so that especially her later writing is ‘a deliberate paring down by a novelist of wide-ranging gifts’ (1968: 111). Jebb says ‘Few living writers are as gifted in their use of language as Jean Rhys’ (1968: n.p.) Haltrecht (1968) saw that any ‘novelettish’ quality in the plots of the stories was turned back by Rhys's vision and voice. Sullivan noticed the extremely funny quality of many of the stories, ‘without taking a single step towards the artificially comic’ (1968: 549). A few critics were not impressed (for example, Higgins 1968), but for the most part Tigers Are Better-Looking enjoyed intelligent and perceptive praise.

   Bailey thought Sleep It Off, Lady had a unity not apparent at first reading (1976: 1321). Sullivan noted her theme of growing old, detachedly and ironically observed (1976); Clapp (1976) thought the astringent tone of Rhys's writing saved her from self-parody; Hall (1976) enjoyed the precision of the small details which give depth to short, plain sentences. Most reviewers were genuinely supportive and took the time to notice specific details of Rhys's achieved style or themes: the only reservations tended to be about stories which seemed fragmentary, not much plotted and without varied characterisation. Wood (1976) accused Rhys of occasional sentimentality: she took great pains to guard against it.

10. Critics coming to the selection of The Left Bank stories in Tigers Are Better-Looking in 1968 often praised them. Baker (1968) thought the early stories had great vitality. Jebb (1968), like other reviewers, thought the author of both The Left Bank and the Tigers Are Better-Looking stories evidently the same woman.

11. Notably Gardiner (1989); Le Gallez (1990); Howells (1991); Gregg (1995); S. Thomas (1994; 1996a).

12. On the whole, Rhys's stories have been thought less than her novels, but she did complete a number of very fine short pieces, placing her idiosyncratic signature on the form: Malcolm and Malcolm's study is very thin (1996) but clearly by focussing on the stories alone declares them to be as major an issue in Rhys's achievement as the novels.

13. Of the stories collected here which were not in The Left Bank, ‘The Sound of the River’ is an evident fictional version of experience, i.e. the death of Leslie Tilden Smith, Rhys's second husband. The comparison may be made between the story and Rhys's letter to Phyllis Smyser, Leslie's daughter, to October 1945 (UTC) (Angier attributes this letter to Anne, Leslie's other daughter).

14. The very reason we have so many drafts from Rhys's later period is the fact that she needed typists who generally preserved each draft. Rhys herself threw manuscripts away, including the first full manuscript of Wide Sargasso Sea. However there are important early drafts of ‘The Lotus’ and ‘The Insect World’ in the OEB.

15. Angier (1990), for example, likes the story, but perhaps this is because she is impressed with the autobiographical honesty which informs the character Petronella.

16. In various drafts it is ‘breasts’ or ‘breast’, finally being ‘one very small breast’.

17. Antoinette in Wide Sargasso Sea dreams she follows a man into a forest.

18. The REB contains a draft version of the story. It opens with a letter to ‘Elsie [deleted] Ina’ about Jimmy Longa. Elsie and Ina's exchange of letters continues to discuss Longa's story. Here the little girl who cries because of him is called Rosalie (the name given to the little girl in ‘Dear, Darling Mr. Ramage’ which became ‘Pioneers, Oh, Pioneers’). The GEB has a draft beginning of ‘Pioneers, Oh, Pioneers’.

19. Her first book Shape-Shifter (1990) established Melville as a deft storyteller with an acute ear for different Caribbean and English voices. Melville was born in Guyana and moved to Britain in childhood.

20. In this long letter, Rhys says Holloway really ‘ought to be bombed’ and speaks of the women she met, some of whom she liked. She also mentions a song she heard at Holloway ‘that haunts me’ and that she felt she should write but nobody would want to publish it: indeed she did write about the Holloway song, and this story is one of her best: Lennox Honychurch, in conversation with me, suggested this is her version of Selvon's classic The Lonely Londoners. Most of her stories, like her novels, were painstaking revisions of her life: in a letter to Francis Wyndham (5 July 1964), she mentions her best friend in the village is a Sikh who sells women's clothes door to door and who appears in the thinly fictionalised story ‘Who Knows What's Up In The Attic’, (SIOL), a version of a visit paid to Rhys by Jan van Houts (see Frickey, ed. 1990: 28-34 for van Houts's version of the encounter).

21. She questioned this title in a letter to Francis Wyndham (27 November 1969), thinking, briefly, of ‘Labour Lost’ but she fortunately retained her first title. ‘Temps Perdi’ was not included in either of Rhys's two later collections. It was first published in Art and Literature (1967) and was then chosen for Penguin Modern Stories (1969).

22. See After Leaving Mr. MacKenzie, quoted chapter 4, where the butterfly is a fragile victim of the protagonist's immaturity.

23. Hulme and Whitehead (1992) include this section of the story, titled ‘Visit to the Carib Quarter’ in their anthology Wild Majesty: Encounters with Caribs from Columbus to the Present Day, marking thus the closeness of the piece to personal essay.

24. I mention this because it seems to me that by mining Rhys's fiction for biography to quite the extent that she does, Angier obscures the delicate continuum between Rhys's experience, developing drafts, personal essays and distanced fiction.

25. The interaction of books and experience, of books and Caribbean landscape, is significant also in Wide Sargasso Sea and Smile Please.

26. A letter survives in the Tulsa Collection from Leslie Tilden Smith to a member of his family which makes this connection clear.

27. Rhys wrote four wartime stories which remain to us: ‘Temps Perdi’, ‘The Solid House’, ‘The Insect World’ and ‘I Spy a Stranger’. The last, like the first here, was published in Penguin Modern Stories (1969) and not in either of the two late collections.