Smile Please - Softcover

Jean Rhys was born in Dominica in 1894. After arriving in England aged sixteen, she became a chorus girl and drifted between different jobs before moving to Paris, where she started to write in the late 1920s. She published a story collection and four novels, after which she disappeared from view and lived reclusively for many years. In 1966 she made a sensational comeback with her masterpiece, Wide Sargasso Sea, written in difficult circumstances over a long period. Rhys died in 1979.

These volumes provide as close to a self-portrait of the author as readers are likely to get. Rhys died in 1979, leaving behind only a handful of the planned sketches for her autobiography, Smile Please, which LJ's reviewer found "fascinating but frustratingly incomplete" (LJ 4/15/80). The Letters volume (LJ 6/1/84) helps fill in some of the blanks.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.