Goodreads helps you keep track of books you want to read.

Start by marking “Smile Please: An Unfinished Autobiography” as Want to Read:

Other editions

Enlarge cover

Rate this book

Clear rating

1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars

Open Preview

Smile Please: An Unfinished Autobiography

by Jean Rhys , Diana Athill (Introduction)

4.1 of 5 stars 4.10 · rating details · 208 ratings · 19 reviews

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.

Paperback , 176 pages

Published September 1st 1995 by Penguin Classics (first published 1979)

more details... edit details

Get a copy:

Or buy for

Friend Reviews

To see what your friends thought of this book, please sign up.

Reader Q&A

To ask other readers questions about Smile Please , please sign up .

Be the first to ask a question about Smile Please

Lists with This Book

The Complete Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi

Books About Women Artists

10th out of 106 books — 26 voters

I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou

Literary biographies

36th out of 340 books — 54 voters

More lists with this book...

Community Reviews

(showing 1-30 of 713)

filter | sort : default (?) | rating details

Sep 17, 2012 Kris rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: memoir , literary-criticism , non-fiction

There is something sadly fitting about Smile Please ’s being an unfinished autobiography. According to her publisher Diana Athill in the volume's foreword, Rhys was reluctant to revisit in an autobiography painful aspects of her past that she had already treated in her novels. At the same time, Rhys was frustrated by her readers' tendency to assume all scenes and characters in her novels were drawn directly from her own life.

This explanation of Rhys’s decision to reverse herself and begin work ...more

flag 62 likes · Like · see review

view all 72 comments

deleted user Kris wrote: "Lauren wrote: "This is an exceptional review, and really heartfelt. I have Smile Please on my shelf (I'm going to be doing her for my dis ...more
Aug 19, 2013 04:06AM

Traveller Beautiful, sad review. :(
Feb 05, 2015 05:20AM

Sep 18, 2012 Jenn(ifer) rated it 4 of 5 stars

Recommended to Jenn(ifer) by: Kris

Shelves: summer-of-women-2012 , xx , memoir , non-fiction , read-in-2012 , my-reviews-that-dont-suck

Reviewing this might break my heart.

*****
It was a beautiful place - wild, untouched, above all untouched, with an alien, disturbing, secret loveliness. And it kept its secret. I'd find myself thinking, 'What I see is nothing - I want what it hides.’

That paragraph is taken from Wide Sargasso Sea , and doesn’t it beautifully express what we want from an autobiography? We want to know what is hidden. We want to know what we cannot glean from the books. Jean wrote, “I have not met other writers ofte ...more

flag 39 likes · Like · see review

Apr 22, 2012 Mariel rated it 4 of 5 stars

Recommends it for: their manners are perfection and the opposite of mine

Recommended to Mariel by: just one little girl and me

Night has a thousand eyes,
day but one

Jean Rhys novels were autobiographical. I didn't want to go around being an asshole reading her books assuming that everything within was autobiographical. Other people went around saying it a lot. I would shake them by their shoulders and ask if they didn't feel like mind readers as I did. That's how I feel when I read Jean Rhys novels. It is a large part of why I love her as much as I do. I had a feeling the outlook, at least, was autobiographical. If you h Night has a thousand eyes,
day but one

Jean Rhys novels were autobiographical. I didn't want to go around being an asshole reading her books assuming that everything within was autobiographical. Other people went around saying it a lot. I would shake them by their shoulders and ask if they didn't feel like mind readers as I did. That's how I feel when I read Jean Rhys novels. It is a large part of why I love her as much as I do. I had a feeling the outlook, at least, was autobiographical. If you have read her novels you will recognize her life in all of them. Her childhood in the Caribbean islands is reflected in Wide Sargasso Sea. The move from the heat to the cold of England is Voyage in the Dark, as well as the love affair she didn't know what it would be like when it ended. English men judging her with their devaluing eyes. This is not a pretty little girl. I had own moment like that Englishman when I was a little girl. This strange man went in for a handshake and saw that I had been licking the salt of nervousness off of my palms. I can remember the look he gave me still. Not a pretty little girl. I had the sensation again of reading Jean Rhys's mind. The part of her mind that feels as if it has been taken a hold of by someone else. They could have stuck their flags of Dominica or England or France in the dark parts and flap despite any new winds. We are still here.

The look a beautiful island girl gives young Jean. We all hate you. How can those two eyes speak for all of the eyes of the island? You don't belong here in your white ghost skin against our night time camouflage. Her brothers and sisters, dark to her fair, move on without her. They leap off the stage during her birthday play. To hell with this shit! Scared of aunts, scared of mommy. Scared until their absence is just an absence. If you have to be someone other than you... Jean learns how to be alone.

Sometimes it was not like mind reading and Rhys tried to explain things that had worked for me better when I could read the waves coming off the trembling women waiting and waiting (for someone, or to die, or just for some baby darkness again). Her repression is explained away because she saw her dog doing it (doggy style, no doubt) and her mom told her to repress it. Shit, I've seen that loads of times! I once walked in on my uncle doing it on the couch when I came home from school. The dogs were better. It is interesting that she says she remembered always if she had tried to repress. But still, sometimes you know how people just tell you things about themselves? That can be interesting because you know what someone else thinks is interesting to tell someone else. What people tell you isn't always true. I know! I'm telling stuff no one knows right here. This autobiography isn't free of that either. Not that I can know for certain, or anything, but I had a feeling. The pain in her novels belie a lover who was good to her. A lover who paid her off as a whore through the letterhead of his lawyer? A family who sends her off to England and would not have her back into their familial embrace. Jean learns how to be alone.

Her husband who was a criminal walked around inside the criminal husband who couldn't walk free without walking right back into the noose of Quartet. I noticed that the other inspiration for Quartet was omitted. Maybe because he's famous? (Even though I don't remember his name I know that he's famous. To other people.) I'm sure they have some bodies of water with names that I could make some clever remark like the river of denial. Curse my geography. The dire straits?

Smile Please (I heard similar things all throughout my youth. Complete with ironic nicknames) is titled an unfinished biography. Jean Rhys died before she could finish it, it is true. I consider it unfinished because I don't believe in the doom she professes to be her fate. What if the film kept rolling... It didn't have to be that way even if that was how it happened. (That it was their choice is why her first novels are my favorites and Wide Sargasso Sea I do not love.) I mean, she lets go of them all, except for in her writing. I loved this book when she's writing about her life about the things that happened. It is frustrating the editorial notes about how this or that portended her misery. But really? Jean Rhys has the fiery eye of Sauron turned on herself. On others she would burn inside out rather than look at the light within as they fried (like a face looks when you stick a flash light in your mouth). That's the feeling that I have. I know that one only knows oneself, I do. I still wonder why if you are creating a world in a novel why you would not create beyond yourself to other people and be at ease with yourself. Well, I know it goes that way because I struggle with that myself. I know how set adrift she felt when she looks at the photographs of the little herself when she felt flesh limbs with other blood limbs in a fountain. A fountain of youth, Mariel? Yes! What do you want from me? I'm no writer. Where did it all go wrong? I care about what she missed. I guess she was trying to get back something she missed. It's just a feeling I had while reading this. Jean Rhys is alone even in her novels. She couldn't even get to have it even then. Jean doesn't learn how to be alone. One of her rituals as a girl was to sit in the stairs and listen to the music until she couldn't bear to hear anymore. She fell in love with words. She learns how to be alone.

The night has eyes...

This is from a diary entry she wrote in the 1940s and didn't know if she could find a way to include in Smile Please. Fuck!
"No more quotations. Paul Morand says in one of his books that English novelists always start with a quotation. The text before the sermon. I found that witty."
Fuck! I've been doing that!

P.s. I blew through all the Jean Rhys way too fast. I'm almost done with all the short stories and there will only be the letters. Why do I always do this? ...more

flag 21 likes · Like · see review

Feb 08, 2015 Annelies rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: english

This was very interesting to read. I read Wide Sargasso Sea before and I felt that it must have come from some deep kinship with Bertha/Antoinette.
This memoir starts of with a foreword by Diana Athill, Jean Rhys' editor. She states that a lot of Rhys' private life had already been used in her novels, but that they were not autobiographical in every detail, as readers sometimes suppose. In Smile Please I have seen quite a number of details that I recognise form Wide Sargasso Sea , but there is eno This was very interesting to read. I read Wide Sargasso Sea before and I felt that it must have come from some deep kinship with Bertha/Antoinette.
This memoir starts of with a foreword by Diana Athill, Jean Rhys' editor. She states that a lot of Rhys' private life had already been used in her novels, but that they were not autobiographical in every detail, as readers sometimes suppose. In Smile Please I have seen quite a number of details that I recognise form Wide Sargasso Sea , but there is enough context to emphasize that Bertha in WSS is not a clone of Jean Rhys.

Smile Please is, though not at all gloomy and dark, a story of loss. She loses her childhood home Bona Vista, her brothers leave for school in England, her spoiled little sister takes all attention from her mother. She remembers instances where her friend Willie doesn't want to play with her anymore, her nurse doesn't like her and she can't see her aunts anymore because of family quarrels.
The burned house with the mounting stone brought me straight back to Coulibri.
In her adult life when she takes matters more into her own hands she seems somewhat happier, but the childhood recollections are almost all of neglect and loss.

With WSS in mind the following passages struck me:

"There is something as unstable as water in me, and when things get tough I go away. I haven't got what the English call 'guts'."

"I would never be part of anything. I would never really belong anywhere, and I knew it, and all my life would be the same, trying to belong, and failing."

...more

flag 4 likes · Like · see review

Dec 09, 2009 Núria rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: 2009 , 5-favoritos , literatura-en-ingles , mios , siglo-xx , no-ficcion

Creo que Jean Rhys ya era una escritora que me gustaba antes de leer nada de ella. De hecho, lo primero que leí de ella, 'El ancho mar de los Sargazos', no me gustó tanto como esperaba, pero ella seguía gustándome como escritora más de lo que me pudieran gustar los libros que escribiera. El problema es que esperaba mucho de 'El ancho mar de los Sargazos', porque se trataba nada más ni nada menos que la narración del primer matrimonio del señor Rochester de 'Jane Eyre' con Antoinette Cosway (la l Creo que Jean Rhys ya era una escritora que me gustaba antes de leer nada de ella. De hecho, lo primero que leí de ella, 'El ancho mar de los Sargazos', no me gustó tanto como esperaba, pero ella seguía gustándome como escritora más de lo que me pudieran gustar los libros que escribiera. El problema es que esperaba mucho de 'El ancho mar de los Sargazos', porque se trataba nada más ni nada menos que la narración del primer matrimonio del señor Rochester de 'Jane Eyre' con Antoinette Cosway (la loca del desván), porque se trataba nada más ni nada menos que de una reescritura des de una óptica feminista y postcolonial de un clásico de la literatura inglesa. La idea me pareció brillante, la ejecución no tanto, pero seguí queriendo a Jean Rhys, porque es una de esas escritoras (como Janet Frame) que tuvo una vida con la que me es imposible no identificarme, no tanto por lo que vivió sino por lo que sintió (o más exactamente por lo que sufrió).

'Una sonrisa, por favor' es la autobiografía inacabada que Jean Rhys empezó a escribir cuando tenía más de ochenta años. Y ahora ya puedo decir que adoro a sus libros (al menos un libro suyo) tanto como la adoro a ella. Jean Rhys nació el 1890 en Dominica, hija de un médico galés y una dama criolla de origen escocés. Se crió en una isla dividida entre blancos y negros, con una niñera que le infundió el miedo, con un padre que casi siempre estaba ausente y con una madre distante y a la que tenía miedo, con unos hermanos mayores que pronto se marcharon de la isla para seguir con sus vidas y con una hermana pequeña a la que nunca le pudo coger auténtico afecto por culpa de los celos. Gwen (que era su verdadero nombre) se convirtió pronto en una niña tímida, insegura, asustadiza, y solitaria. Todo esto lo cuenta Jean Rhys en esta autobiografía.

Rhys luego se fue a vivir a Inglaterra a estudiar, pero tuvo que dejar los estudios cuando murió su padre, así que empezó a trabajar como corista y luego como actriz en obras de teatro de segunda fila y como extra en películas de bajo presupuesto. En Inglaterra pasó frío y se sintió sola, supo que la tristeza ya no la dejaría en toda su vida, pero aún así intentó dejarla atrás y se fue a Paris con su primer marido, allí trabajó como institutriz, perdió un hijo recién nacido y estrechó su relación con el alcohol. Conoció a Ford Madox Ford y empezó a escribir cuentos bajo su tutela. Y ahí se termina la historia que narra 'Una sonrisa, por favor', pero no se trata de un final feliz, porque Rhys se fue hundiendo cada vez más en el alcoholismo y el rencor (que probablemente le venía de su primera época en Inglaterra cuando sus profes de interpretación la machacaban por no tener un acento británico puro y perfecto) y no empezó a ser reconocida (y aún de una forma fugaz e incompleta) hasta el final de su vida, hasta que a mediados de los sesenta escribió 'El ancho mar de los Sargazos'.

Aunque en 'Una sonrisa, por favor' no se mencionan muchas veces las palabras "tristeza" y "soledad", es sin duda de esto de lo que trata el libro. Es un libro profundamente triste, deprimente casi. A diferencia de muchas autobiografías, Rhys pocas veces mira al pasado con nostalgia, más bien lo mira con la conciencia de haber sido toda la vida una perdedora, pero sin caer nunca en la autocompasión. No se trata tampoco de una autobiografía al uso, más bien diría que se trata de una serie de episodios autobiográficos contados por orden cronológico. Rhys describe su vida a grandes pinceladas, contando no tanto los hechos estrictos sino las sensaciones y sentimientos que tuvo al largo de su vida. Es una obra muy triste, lo repito. Y muy bella, que quede claro. Y reconfortante del mismo modo en que es reconfortante saber que existen mujeres que (como yo) nunca han dejado del todo de ser niñas tímidas, inseguras, asustadizas y solitarias.

Cuando una la termina tiene la sensación que todas las relaciones que establecemos con las personas con las que nos cruzamos no son nada más que superficiales, impulsadas sólo por las circunstancias, con fecha de caducidad, porque en el fondo todos nos enfrentamos solos a nuestra tristeza. Y una se da cuenta que la vida no tiene sentido y que las casualidades más absurdas son las que le rigen. Jean Rhys se pasó muchísimos años sin prácticamente leer y empezó a escribir de la forma más curiosa. Se estaba hospedando en una habitación de lo más deprimente y había una mesa vacía que no soportaba ver vacía, así que decidió comprar algo y se decidió por unos cuadernos, sólo porque eran bonitos no porque tuviera ganas de escribir, pero una noche decidió escribir/vomitar todo lo que le había pasado en Inglaterra y así fue como empezó todo. ...more

flag 2 likes · Like · see review

Jul 31, 2014 Alexandra Naughton rated it 5 of 5 stars

God I love Jean Rhys so much.

flag 2 likes · Like · see review

Mar 27, 2014 Ambivalenza rated it 5 of 5 stars

There were pages that I just had to read and then reread and then copy into my notebook. The book got more interesting when she moved to London, Indeed, "It began to grow cold" and she reflected it with such beauty. This is a book that I will read again. I got a little stuck in the chapter where she set up a trial for herself.

flag 2 likes · Like · see review

Jun 27, 2014 C.S. Burrough rated it 5 of 5 stars

Recommends it for: Fans of the author

Jean Rhys died aged 87 in 1979 before completing her autobiography, which she had started dictating only months before. Later that year the incomplete text appeared posthumously under this title.

After years of reading and rereading Jean's fiction I, like many, was doubtless it was all pieces of her own life. That was irrelevant to me, yet so relevant too. That presumption - that she needed to borrow from herself rather than create - felt disloyal, insulting to her writing ability. Yet I also fea Jean Rhys died aged 87 in 1979 before completing her autobiography, which she had started dictating only months before. Later that year the incomplete text appeared posthumously under this title.

After years of reading and rereading Jean's fiction I, like many, was doubtless it was all pieces of her own life. That was irrelevant to me, yet so relevant too. That presumption - that she needed to borrow from herself rather than create - felt disloyal, insulting to her writing ability. Yet I also feared that by reading this I may be disappointed discovering that her fiction was not, after all, dressed up (or down) fragments her own life.

Such was the dilemma underlying my prevarication in reading this, a slow self-torture not unlike Jean's own which I knew so intimately from her stories. When I mustered the courage to read this it was the milestone I hoped it would be.

Yes, Jean's fictional books were distinguishable here in her real life. But thankfully, as the saying goes, 'truth is always stranger than fiction'. So I was saved, my dilemma redundant.

I had a reticence that this felt intrusive, like rummaging through her drawers when she had gone. However, I consoled myself, she would not have disclosed here what she chose not to, nobody was forcing her to say anything. My mother once said, 'I taught you everything you know ... but not everything I know!' Here was my favourite writer inferring likewise with those deliciously pregnant narrative gaps.

As devotees and biographers have noted, Jean bared her soul in her writing but kept some to herself. I was relieved she did likewise here, retained some small, precious dignity after the literary world had bellowed at her, in her dotage, for forever baring her most intimate truths veiled in gossamer thin fiction.

Many have concurred it was not just what Jean wrote that was so brilliant: it was what she did not write, those gaps left for the reader's mind to fill. Indeed, one biographer who researched her old drafts revealed that Jean always underwent a severe, almost self-lacerating editing process, originally taught her by ex-lover and mentor Ford Maddox Ford. Here she does it one final time as she grinningly waves us farewell, leaving us longing to know what else happened in between these episodes she so tantalisingly punctuates.

In this Jean includes her first poem, penned the first time her adolescent heart broke. It comprises three simple words written three consecutive times: 'I didn't know, I didn't know, I didn't know.'

I will not desist revisiting her works whenever I get those Jean Rhys blues. That would be unthinkable. I need to know her words await me.

This, her last word, was not for this fan the end of Jean Rhys, not something that left me with any disloyal finality or closure on her. Rather, it confirmed that I should start over and read her books from scratch. Again. And again. And again.
...more

flag 1 like · Like · see review

Jun 30, 2011 Courtney rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: favorites , non-fiction

I read this book after "Wide Sargasso Sea" was assigned in one of my college lit classes. It is more like a collection of scenes, but it is a powerful work. Rhys sardonic humor is fascinating. I believe she is one of those people I would love to have lunch with...I guess if I get my wish of heaven being a big Barnes and Noble then we might.

flag 1 like · Like · see review

Jan 19, 2015 Susie Anderson rated it 5 of 5 stars

"i'm only twenty but i have to go on living and living"

flag 1 like · Like · see review

Jul 19, 2009 Cooper Cooper rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

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 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.
...more

flag Like · see review

Aug 28, 2015 Stella Wang rated it 2 of 5 stars

This book did not really interest me?? It's like other autobiographies but much more boring..

flag Like · see review

Dec 05, 2014 Rachel rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: nonfiction

Only interesting because I love Jean Rhys

flag Like · see review

Dec 11, 2012 Adrian added it

Slim volume of autobiography by the novelist most famous for Wide Sargasso Sea. She covers her childhood in Dominica the West Indies island and her dispassionate upbringing. To her surprise the blacks hate them. At about the age of 20 she leaves Dominica with an aunt for England where she decides to become an actress. Bumps around in jobs as an extra in films (this is before WWI) and as a chorus girl. There is an oblique reference to what I assume was an abortion. Marries a somewhat disreputable ...more

flag Like · see review

Nov 20, 2010 h rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: 2010 , biography , library , school

exciting for what reveals about jean rhys, i wish it were more complete. i read this for research, and it gives me a few interesting tidbits. if you're at all interested in rhys as an author, this is well worth seeking out. it's a quick read and provides an intriguing window into her perspective.

flag Like · see review

Feb 13, 2015 John O'Brien rated it 4 of 5 stars

In the introduction, Diana Athill states that one of Jean Rhys motivations for writing a memior was to distinguish fact from fiction. Which is perhaps ironic, given this reads like one of her 'novels'.

flag Like · see review

Jul 19, 2013 Laurie Borchard rated it 4 of 5 stars

I really enjoyed this unconventional autobiography. Her story is told in these really great bits & pieces like a collection of short stories. It made me want to go back & rereading her novels.

flag Like · see review

Apr 29, 2012 Linda rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: 2012 , biographical , non-fiction

living and living and living.

rhys' two adages: 1. you must earn death; 2. you will be helped

flag Like · see review

Sep 04, 2012 Angela rated it 5 of 5 stars

Original, quirky and beautifully written. I will now re-read Wide Sargasso Sea.

flag Like · see review

Honour marked it as to-read
Oct 02, 2015

Kathleen marked it as to-read
Oct 02, 2015

Rhiannon marked it as to-read
Sep 30, 2015

Elizabeth marked it as to-read
Sep 25, 2015

Yaman Maarrawi marked it as to-read
Sep 25, 2015

Brandi marked it as to-read
Sep 23, 2015

Rosa marked it as to-read
Sep 22, 2015

Joy Ingram marked it as to-read
Sep 19, 2015

Anouk marked it as to-read
Sep 14, 2015

BonB marked it as to-read
Sep 09, 2015

Ismael Schonhorst marked it as to-read
Sep 07, 2015

« previous 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 … 23 24 next »

new topic
Discuss This Book

There are no discussion topics on this book yet. Be the first to start one »

Recommend it | Stats | Recent status updates

Readers Also Enjoyed

Genres

Non Fiction

15 users

Autobiography > Memoir

9 users

Biography

8 users

Biography > Autobiography

3 users

Literature

3 users

Biography Memoir

2 users

Womens

2 users

European Literature > British Literature

2 users

See top shelves...

About Jean Rhys

Jean Rhys originally Ella Gwendolen Rees Williams, was a Caribbean novelist who wrote in the mid 20th century. Her first four novels were published during the 1920s and 1930s, but it was not until the publication of Wide Sargasso Sea in 1966 that she emerged as a significant literary figure. A "prequel" to Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre, Wide Sargasso Sea won a prestigious WH Smith Literary Award in ...more

More about Jean Rhys...

Books by Jean Rhys

More…

Share This Book

Share on your website

title link	preview: Smile Please: An Unfinished Autobiography
avg rating	preview: Smile Please: An Unfinished Autobiography Goodreads rating: 4.10 (208 ratings)
small image	preview: click here [close]
med image	preview: click here [close]
BBCode	[url=http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/538896.Smile_Please?utm_medium=api&utm_source=blog_book][img]http://d.gr-assets.com/books/1360499347l/538896.jpg[/img][/url] [url=http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/538896.Smile_Please?utm_medium=api&utm_source=blog_book]Smile Please: An Unfinished Autobiography by Jean Rhys[/url]

+ Share on your website

Trivia About Sonríe, Por Favor...

No trivia or quizzes yet. Add some now »

Quotes from Smile Please: An Unfin...

“I would never be part of anything. I would never really belong anywhere, and I knew it, and all my life would be the same, trying to belong, and failing. Always something would go wrong. I am a stranger and I always will be, and after all I didn’t really care.” — 115 likes

“I like shape very much. A novel has to have shape, and life doesn't have any. ” — 15 likes

More quotes…

See a Problem?

Preview — Smile Please by Jean Rhys

Smile Please: An Unfinished Autobiography

Friend Reviews

Reader Q&A

Lists with This Book

Community Reviews

new topic
Discuss This Book

Readers Also Enjoyed

Genres

About Jean Rhys

Books by Jean Rhys

Share This Book

Share on your website

Trivia About Sonríe, Por Favor...

Quotes from Smile Please: An Unfin...