Jean Rhys’s five novels are available for the first time in a one-volume edition, handsomely produced, with period photographs of French scenes by the expatriate Hungarian artist Brassaï.[1] Since Jean Rhys’s death in 1979, an unfinished autobiography (Smile Please) and a selection of her letters have also appeared, plus David Plante’s memoir in Difficult Women, based upon his brief but intense association with Jean Rhys in the mid-Seventies. She was then over eighty, no matter which of the two recorded birth-dates—1890 or 1894—you accept, ill and exhausted, yet sporadically engaged in composing an account of her life, her ostensible aim being to correct all the misstatements made about her, to “get the facts down,” as one of her editors put it. The trouble was, facts, dates, chronology bored and exasperated her, as David Plante learned when he tried to help her organize her material. But the descriptive details, he also learned, had to be right, for in them lay the truth about everything. Indeed, she was convinced that if you used the wrong word or image, nothing you said could be believed.

That old woman in Plante’s disturbing memoir is not to be brushed away. Far too vivid in her rages as well as her helplessness, she sticks in the mind—a physical wreck sporting a broad-brimmed hat and a raffish look, the all-too-familiar drink in her shaky hand. With the same hand, she has made up her face, a thick patch of powder here,