Smile please: an unfinished autobiography

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A photograph of author Jean Rhys is on the front cover.

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Notes:: Rhys' unfinished autobiography covers her life through what she calls her "first steps" to England (1907) and her leaving school for the stage (1908). Written in chapters entitled "Smile Please" and "Books", the work provides a series of snapshots of a largely unhappy childhood in Dominica. The longest section details her difficult situation at school as a white Creole "hated" by the "coloured girls". This very brief and certainly haunting work sheds light on Rhys' complex and often contradictory attitudes about race as well as on her own experiences as a colonial in England. Her strong dislike of England and the English is manifest here. Rhys died before she finished more than a section running 94 pages and ending roughly in the year she left school. Her editor and friend, Diana Athill, prepared the remainder from Rhys' notes, which appears as the section entitled "It Began to Grow Cold." Athill appended some of Rhys' rough notes at the end, as well as a part she structured as a trial, entitled "Do You Believe in God?" First published by Andre Deutsch Ltd., 1979.