Smile Please by Jean Rhys (1979)

 I haven't read Rhys since the 90s. Then it was her short stories, and I now have almost no memory of them, apart from the feeling of being stirred. This is her unfinished autobiography, presented here in three parts: an almost finished early section (volume?) about her childhood on Dominica - the title piece. A much more 'imperfect' section on her time in London and Paris in the Edwardian period and through the First World War - It Began to Grow Cold. And then a diary excerpt, which she had hoped to either include or make use of, from the 40s, called At the Ropemakers' Arms. The early part is quietly luminous, and gives a fine impress of her sensitivity and feeling of ill-fittedness for the ordinary expectations of late Victorian (and indeed colonial) middle class life - she exhibits the classic mixture of understanding of indebtedness and resentment at it which is common to children who don't 'fit' well. The less finished second part, though, is where it really catches fire - somehow it has a more immediate quality, a riffle of more recognisable tension and what seems her typically contrary shelteredness and worldly self-deprecation winning out by turns. The last section is an attempt, which could well have become brilliant if she'd had time to work on it, to form a philosophical conversation with herself, question and answer, outlining her take on her life and love and death, with all of their contrarieties, and the unsayable far reaches positioned carefully and honed in on in their exact spaces. Through these all, she mentions exercise books and notebooks in which she has been writing, and from which some of the material here has been mined. Here's hoping that that matter has been preserved, as it also apparently includes early fictional work, alongside personal journals of various shades.