Certainly it’s where Rhys’s sense of herself as an outsider began to emerge. Smile Please focuses on Rhys’s childhood in Dominica, which retained a hold on the writer’s imagination into her old age – Seymour sees it as the “wellspring” from which her novels originated. “It was the first time I was aware of time, change, and the longing for the past. “The eyes were a stranger’s eyes,” she writes. Then she recalls looking at the same photo three years later, realising “with dismay” that she was no longer the same girl. Rhys began her memoir, Smile Please, with a memory of having her photo taken as a young girl, watching the photographer dodge out from behind a dark cloth. Though she would describe herself as always feeling like “a person at a masked ball without a mask”, we glimpse Rhys behind a painted face, in a mirror, through the eyes of another, frozen in a photo, or through the imaginative lens of her fiction. But, like many of the compelling stories from her life, it both invites and resists analysis: there is something defiantly unknowable at its core. It captures something of her: eccentric, demanding, haunted by her past, and committed to looking herself dead in the eye – a commitment that might well resemble self-absorption. This small but novelistic detail from Miranda Seymour’s immersive new biography of Rhys feels suggestive.

Reflecting on the incident almost 40 years later, he said: “I still don’t have a clue what it was all about.”

Her puzzled friend left the room, leaving Rhys alone, staring at her made-up face in the mirror. While he rouged her lips and cheeks, Rhys watched silently, sipping a martini once the job was done, she asked him to leave. In 1977, when she was in her late eighties, the novelist Jean Rhys asked an actor to paint her face with the stage make-up she had worn as a young actress.

Jean rhys novel