About this title: Jean Rhys' unfinished posthumous autobiography. From the early days on Dominica to the bleak time in England, living in bedsits on gin and little else, to Paris with her first husband, this is a lasting memorial to a unique artist.
Note: This is a general synopsis. Each listing is described below.
Edition: First American Edition
Binding: Hardcover
Publisher: Harper & Row, New York
Date Published: 1979
ISBN-13:9780060136024ISBN:0060136022
Description: Very Good in Very Good jacket. 8vo-8"-9" Tall. Quarter brown cloth binding. Name and date inked on front flyleaf. Faint scattered foxing to page edges. A clean, tight copy. 151pp, photos. Foreword by Diana Athill. 1975 Vogue magazine article entitled, 'My Day, ' by Jean Rhys laid in. Dust jacket, lightly rubbed, in new mylar cover. read more
Edition: First American Edition
Binding: Hardcover
Publisher: Harper & Row, New York
Date Published: 1979
ISBN-13:9780060136024ISBN:0060136022
Description: Near Fine in Very Good jacket. 8vo-8"-9" Tall. Quarter brown cloth binding. A clean and unmarked copy. 151pp, photos. Dust jacket, with sticker shadow on front flap, in new mylar cover. read more
Edition: First Edition.
Binding: Hardcover
Publisher: HARPER & ROW. NY 1979
Date Published: 1979
Description: Dust Jacket Included. First American Edition. Near fine in a fine dj. (Traces of light foxing at edges) Author's unfinished memoirs. (LRC) read more
Edition: First
Binding: hardcover
Publisher: Harper and Row, New York
Date Published: (1975)
ISBN-13:9780060136024ISBN:0060136022
Description: First American edition. Review copy with the publisher's slip laid in. Illustrated with black and white photographs. Fine in fine dustwrapper. read more
Binding: Paperback
Publisher: Penguin Books
Date Published: 1981
ISBN-13:9780140056532ISBN:014005653X
Description: NEAR FINE. First edition. Looks unused. Slight edge tanning. Very minor storage signs. Otherwise almost as new. Main language English. Weight 130g. read more
Binding: Hardcover
Publisher: HarperCollins Distribution Servi
Date Published: 1979
ISBN-13:9780233972138ISBN:0233972137
Description: Acceptable. GOOD-/GOOD-1ST EDITION 1979 ANDRE DEUTSCH HARDBACK, FOREWORD BY DIANA ATHILL. EX-LIBRARY WITHDRAWN COPY WITH USUAL STAMPS TO END-PAPER. WELL-PRESERVED DUST-JACKET, A LITTLE GRUBBINESS TO PAGE EDGES. TIDY READING COPY ONLY. Worldwide Shipping IMMEDIATE 1ST CLASS/AIRMAIL DISPATCH ~~Please browse our Alibris storefront for more related items, combined postage available. Alibris UK Featured Seller 2009~~ read more
Edition: First Edition
Binding: Hardback
Publisher: Andre Deutsch
Date Published: 1979
ISBN-13:9780233972138ISBN:0233972137
Description: Fair in Good jacket. GOOD-/GOOD-1ST EDITION 1979 ANDRE DEUTSCH HARDBACK, FOREWORD BY DIANA ATHILL. EX-LIBRARY WITHDRAWN COPY WITH USUAL STAMPS TO END-PAPER. WELL-PRESERVED DUST-JACKET, A LITTLE GRUBBINESS TO PAGE EDGES. TIDY READING COPY ONLY. Worldwide Shipping IMMEDIATE 1ST CLASS/AIRMAIL DISPATCH. read more
Edition: the uncorrected proof in light blue wrappers
Binding: Softbound
Publisher: Harper & Row
Date Published: 1979
ISBN-13:9780060136024ISBN:0060136022
Edition: 1st U.S. ed.
Binding: Hardcover
Publisher: Harper & Row, New York
Date Published: c1979
ISBN-13:9780060136024ISBN:0060136022
Description: Good in Good dust jacket. Highlighting/Underlining. light shelfwear, po name, marginalia, DJ front has candle wax remnants, . First printing. viii, 151 p., [4] leaves of plates: ill., ports.; 24 cm. Bibliography: p. 151. read more
Edition: First US printing
Binding: Hardcover
Publisher: Harper & Row, (, New York
Date Published: 1980. )
ISBN-13:9780060136024ISBN:0060136022
Description: Very near fine in a like dustjacket. Hardcover First edition-About four years before her death in 1979, Rhys, already in very poor health, began working on her autobiography, because she wanted to 'set the story straight. ' Written as a series of vignettes, mostly dictated to David Plante, the novelist and her friend, the first section on her childhood on the Caribbean island country of Dominica, was finished, but much of the rest is fragmentary. Includes an introduction by Diana Athill, her ... read more
Binding: Hardcover
Publisher: Harper & Row
Date Published: 1979
ISBN-13:9780060136024ISBN:0060136022
Description: Good. Excellent customer service. May ship from alternate location depending on your zip code and availability. Satisfaction guaranteed! ! read more
Description: Good. Excellent customer service. May ship from alternate location depending on your zip code and availability. Satisfaction guaranteed! ! read more
"Jean Rhys' autobiography is unfinished because she was still working on it when she died at age 89. It is not a continuous narrative, but rather a chronological series of vignettes or snapshots, first of her childhood (till age 16) in Dominica, and then of her subsequent life in England and Paris. Apart from Wide Sargasso Sea, all of her novels closely track her life-indeed, Voyage in the Dark is very tightly based on a diary she kept of an abortive love affair in her early days in England. Rhys used writing explicitly as a form of therapy. After stints as a chorus girl and an actress-in-training, she married a Dutchman and moved to Paris, which she liked far better than England. Almost by chance, her writing was brought to the attention of Ford Maddox Ford, who not only encouraged her but made her his mistress. Rhys' early novels (1920s and early 1930s) experienced critical but not commercial success. She dropped out of sight for thirty years; many thought she had died (she hadn't, but two husbands had). Then in the 1960s she suddenly reappeared with Wide Sargasso Sea. Smile Please is very readable-honest and well-written. Rhys cuts through the bs and speaks her own truth, which is often bitter but always perceptive. She was ahead of her time: an anome who marveled at both the wonders and the terrors of nature and man, and who tried to find meaning and solace in the act of writing.
I have watched carnivals on television. They are doubtless very colorful but it seems to me that it is all planned and made up compared to the carnival I remember, when I used to long so fiercely to be black and to dance, too, in the sun, to that music. The carnival I knew has vanished.
Mother St. Joseph was the only colored nun except for the two lay sisters in the kitchen. She was very beautiful.... I was very shocked when, coming away, one of the girls said casually, 'Mother St. Joseph is dying.' I thought that only old people died, or people who had been very ill, accidents of course, not people whom you'd just seen and talked to. I jumped as high as I could and ran very fast. Dying? No, not me, never! The whole thing seemed to me unfair, and probably untrue. We never saw Mother St. Joseph again.
It was there...that I began to feel I loved the land and to know that I would never forget it. There I would go for long walks alone. It's strange growing up in a very beautiful place and seeing that it is beautiful. It was alive, I was sure of it. Behind the bright colors the softness, the hills like clouds and the clouds like fantastic hills. There was something austere, sad, lost, all these things. I wanted to identify myself with it, to lose myself in it. (But it turned its head away, indifferent, and that broke my heart.)
It seems to me now that the whole business of money and sex is mixed up with something very primitive and deep. When you take money directly from somebody you love it becomes not money but a symbol. The bond is now there. The bond has been established. I'm sure the woman's deep-down feeling is 'I belong to this man, I want to belong to him completely.' It is at once humiliating and exciting."
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