Tigers are Better-Looking, with a selection from The Left Bank

by Jean Rhys

Tigers are Better-Looking incorporates selections from Jean Rhys's first book of stories, The Left Bank, published in 1927, and later stories written after 1939. In them she encompasses within a few pages both the gaiety and charm of youth and love, and an awareness of all that threatens them.

Writing in The New York Times, A. Alvarez has called these stories "extraordinary." The early stories have added value in that they illuminate Jean Rhys's development as a writer. Those written later, when her art was mature, are on the level of her novels and demonstrate that she is one of the most distinguished writers of our time, "the best living English novelist," again to quote Alvarez.

The title of this collection comes from the opinion which many of Jean Rhys's characters share, that respectable people are as alarming as tigers, but "tigers are better-looking, aren't they?" It also reflects the astringent humor in her work; an explanation that however sad or even sordid her subject, she is never depressing.

--From the book jacket

Genres: Short Stories, Fiction, Classics, 20th Century, Literary Fiction, France, Womens

236 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1968

About the author

Jean Rhys, CBE (born Ella Gwendolyn Rees Williams; 24 August 1890–14 May 1979) was a British novelist who was born and grew up in the Caribbean island of Dominica. From the age of 16, she mainly resided in England, where she was sent for her education. She is best known for her novel Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), written as a prequel to Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre.

She moved to England at the age of 16 years in 1906 and worked unsuccessfully as a chorus girl. In the 1920s, she relocated to Europe, travelled as a Bohemian artist, and took up residence sporadically in Paris. During this period, Rhys, familiar with modern art and literature, lived near poverty and acquired the alcoholism that persisted throughout the rest of her life. Her experience of a patriarchal society and displacement during this period formed some of the most important themes in her work.

Reviews

[Moira · Rating 5 out of 5]

This has one of my favourite passages about reading ever in it:

"....one of those long, romantic novels, six hundred and fifty pages of small print, translated from French or German or Hungarian or something -- because few of the English ones have the exact feeling I mean. And you read one page of it or even one phrase of it, and then you gobble up all the rest and go about in a dream for weeks afterwards, for months afterwards -- perhaps all your life, who knows? -- surrounded by those six hundred and fifty pages, the houses, the streets, the snow, the river, the roses, the girls, the sun, the ladies' dresses and the gentlemen's voices, the old, wicked, hard-hearted women and the old, sad women, the waltz music -- everything. What is not there you put in afterwards, for it is alive, this book, and it grows in your head. 'The house I was living in when I read that book,' you think, or 'This colour reminds me of that book.'"

[Melissa Kapow · Rating 5 out of 5]

Completely bowled over. Her prickly and precarious narratives of women, men, and other women were spot-on; muse as outsider, as underdog. I felt a complete affinity with her voice. Each story was succinct and began and ended at the precisely right moment. One of my favorite passages:

"I had touched the right spring - even the feeling of his hand on my arm changed. Always the same spring to touch before the sneering expression will go out of their eyes and the sneering sound out of their voices. Think about it - it's very important." - from Till September Petronella

[Evelyn · Rating 5 out of 5]

"They went up the steep stone stairs, past the brass gong in the hall, the brass tray for visiting cards, the dim looking glass, malevolent with age, into the kitchen."

"The dim looking glass, malevolent with age" is very much the sort of Rhysian sentence that can take a reader's breath away. Read this many many years ago-- not sure if the selection from The Left Bank and the Ford Madox Ford essay was included. My recollection is that I didn't care for the stories as much as the novels. This is why re-reading is so valuable. Rhys' experimentation with form was way ahead of her time. My edition is an old Penguin with a black and white photograph.

[Lee Foust · Rating 5 out of 5]

Well, five stars might be a tad exaggerated as superlative collections of stories go, but this is a wonderful collection and key, I think, to understanding the full range of Jean Rhys fabulous oeuvres. It's always been a bit difficult for me to connect Rhys's first four novels--all dealing with fragile women is various stages of desperation and despair and seemingly artistic renderings of her own misadventures--with the literary tour-de-force that is The Wide Sargasso Sea, also dealing with a desperate woman, of course, but also re-writing the Berthe character from Jane Eyre and giving us a sophisticated semi-experimental referential postmodern masterpiece at the same time.

Well, Tigers Are Better Looking helps to bridge the gap between the two techniques, giving us stories that not only progress in time (from 1914 in the first story though WWII era of "I Spy a Stranger") but also in literary technique. Yes, the desperate woman figure returns, but the tales experiment with settings and other narrative strategies as well as exploring memory and juxtaposed narratives to broaden the texts' scope. As much as I really love the intensity of the four early novels, I greatly admired here the ability to breathe a bit, to see moments of reflection between the crises, to see characters through other characters' eyes (a technique I don't recall seeing very much in the novels where the protagonist's and their own experience dominate, and to glimpse bigger pictures, the greater world, even some fond nostalgia for the West Indies of the author's childhood, so seldom invoked in the novels until The Wide Sargasso Sea.

If not one of the greatest story collections of all time, it's at least a very fine one and totally necessary to get a full picture of Jean Rhys's accomplishments as a writer and she is, in my estimation, one of the finest of the modernists, if not of all time.

[Mela · Rating 3 out of 5]

So darned easy to plot that - and always at the last moment - one is afraid. Or cheats oneself with hope.

[from 'Vienne']

Not as even collection, as Sleep It Off Lady: stories. The average is 3,3. But keep in mind that there are a few gems. I recommend to read at least them ('Outside the Machine', 'La Grosse Fifi', 'Vienne').

--> 'Till September Petronella' - 3/4 - I imagine what Jean Rhys wanted to say through this novella (love, the lot of some women) and it had one or two really good points but I had some difficulties with liking the style of narration.

--> 'The Day They Burned the Books' - 2/3 - Too much to read between the lines.

--> 'Let Them Call it Jazz' - 4/5 - This novella had much to tell about those times/people...

--> 'Tigers are Better-Looking' - 2 - I think it could be also a portrait of the times but I didn't see it.

--> 'Outside the Machine' - 5 - A moving glimpse at a few women in a mental hospital.

...there is peace in despair in exactly the same way as there is despair in peace.

...you can't die and come to life again for a few hundred francs. It takes more than that. It takes more, perhaps, than anybody is ever willing to give.

--> 'The Lotus' - 3 - A sad story about an unfortunate girl and how observers can destroy other people.

--> 'A Solid House' - 3/4 - Another tired/restless soul of a woman in a 'solid world' that doesn't understand such souls.

Shall I tell her that in spite of everything they did I died then? Shall I tell her what it feels like to be dead? It's not being sad, it's quite different. It's being nothing, feeling nothing. (...) it's like walking along a road in a fog, knowing that you have left everything behind you. But you don't want to go back; you've got to go on.

But are you telling me the real secret, how to be exactly like everybody else? Tell me, for I am sure you know. If it means being deaf, then I'll be deaf. And if it means being blind, then I'll be blind.

--> 'The Sound of the River' - 2 - I felt the tension but nothing more.

--> 'Illusion' - 4 - The story is still up-to-date. A woman obsessively buying clothes in searching on ... - what she actually looked for??

--> 'From a French Prison' - 3 - Touching, but I am not sure I understand what it was about. About being lonely in the incomprehensible world?

--> 'Mannequin' - 3 - An interesting glimpse at the lives of models (called then mannequins) in Paris in the 1920s/1930s.

--> 'Tea with an Artist' - 2 - I didn't get it.

--> 'Mixing Cocktails' - 2 - I didn't get it right, I think.

--> 'Again the Antilles' - 2/3 - It was nice, although, I am sure that again, I didn't capture all.

--> 'Hunger' - 4 - Sad, heart-wrenching. A perfect example of Rhys' anxieties and some parts of her life.

--> 'La Grosse Fifi' - 5 - One of her best. Another fascinating but also sorrowful glance at a specific world of France (here Riviera) in 1920s/1930s.

--> 'Vienne' - 5 - This time it took place mostly in Vienne. There were many similarities with Paris from her other stories. Because longing for love and freedom is everywhere (and anytime) the same. One of the best of Rhys' novellas.

[Debbie Robson · Rating 3 out of 5]

Tigers are Better-Looking which includes some stories from an earlier collection The Left Bank is, for this reader anyway, a mixed bag but what struck me straight away is how modern all the stories are. I can’t believe a lot of them were written in the 1920s and 30s.
Because I’m researching Paris in the 1920s I started with The Left Bank stories first. As an introduction there is a very patronising preface from Ford Maddox Ford who bemoans the fact Rhys doesn’t like to use topography of the region or descriptive passages as her business is with passion, hardship and emotions. I’m afraid I was a little disappointed as well because I was counting on local colour in the stories. However, I’m not disappointed that I went on to read all the stories.
Illusion is a marvellous character study. From a French Prison is interesting too and points to some of the hardships Rhys must have seen in her lifetime. Mannequin too highlights a world almost gone - except for the life of the top fashion models. “At six o’clock Anna was out in the rue de la Paix; her fatigue forgotten, the feeling that now she really belonged to the great, maddening city possessed her and she was happy in her beautifully cut tailor-made and a beret.
Georgette passed her and smiled; Babette was in a fur coat.
All up the street the mannequins were coming out of the shops, pausing on the pavements a moment, making them as gay and as beautiful as beds of flowers before they walked swiftly away and the Paris night swallowed them up.” I really liked the last two paragraphs of Tea With an Artist. The short story Mixing Cocktails makes you want to read more of Rhys writing about the West Indies as does the story Again the Antilles.
Hunger is one of Rhys’s short stories that could have been written just twenty or thirty years ago. La Grosse Fifi is a more classic story. Vienne, unfortunately didn’t speak to me at all. Lots of gossip and nothing that really reached me.
In Tigers are Better Looking my favourite story (and from the whole book actually) is Let Them Call it Jazz. It begins:
“One bright Sunday morning in July I have trouble with my Notting Hill landlord because he ask for a month’s rent in advance. He tell me this after I live there since winter, settling up every week without fail. I have no job at the time, and If give the money he want there’s not much left. So I refuse. The man drunk already at that early hour, and he abuse me - all talk, he can’t frighten me.”
And there we have it. Immediately we are in this world of a young woman from the Caribbean trying to make ends meet in London in the 1920s. Everything about her is different. The way she acts, talks, dresses and the way she views things. It is a marvellous story. My second favourite story is Till September Petronella. A fascinating look at a young woman’s peripatetic lifestyle dependant almost entirely on the whims of men. The Day They Burned the Books is another literary glimpse into Rhys’s childhood. The title story I’m afraid was another that eluded me, so too The Lotus but Outside the Machine and A Solid House are strange but enjoyable stories. The Sound of the River is another haunting story. And to wrap up I’ll leave you with a few words from that story:
“If I could put it into words it might go, she was thinking. Sometimes you can put it into words - almost - and so get rid of it - almost. Sometimes you can tell yourself I’ll admit I was afraid today. I was afraid of the sleek smooth faces, the rat faces, the way they laughed in the cinema. I’m afraid of escalators and dolls’ eyes. But there aren’t any words for this fear. The words haven’t been invented.”

[Elsie · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is another book of short stories by Jean Rhys. I find her so poetic.
I'm not a good reviewer, I can't restate my feelings well or describe in literary terms her style and themes, but here are a few passages I felt from the stories:

Outside the Machine – about women in a free Paris hospital after the war
They (nurses) too were parts of a machine. They had a strength, a certainty, because all their lives they had belonged to the machine and worked smoothly, in and out, just as they were told. Even if the machine got out of control, even if the machine got out of control, even if it went mad, they would still work in and out, just as they were told, whirling smoothly, faster and faster, to destruction.
…
Through the windows the light turned from dim yellow to mauve, from mauve to grey, from grey to black. Then it was dark except for the unshaded bulbs tinted red all along the ward. Inez put her arm round her head and turned her faced to the pillow.
‘Good night,’ the old lady said. And after a long while she said, ‘Don’t cry, don’t cry.’
Inez whispered, ‘They kill you so slowly …’
The ward was a long, grey river; the bed were ships in the mist…
…
She talked about love and the difference between glamour and dirt. The real difference was L – s d, she said. If there was some money about there could be some glamour; otherwise say what you liked, it was simply dirty – as well as foolish.
‘Plenty of survival value there,’ Inez thought. She lay with her eyes closed, trying to see trees and smooth water. But the pictures she made slipped through her mind too quickly, so that they became distorted and malignant.
That night everybody in the ward was wakeful. Somebody moaned. The nurse rushed about with a bed pan, grumbling under her breath.
…
The days were like that, but when night came she burrowed into the middle of the earth to sleep. ‘Never wake up, never wake up,’ her wise heart told her. But the morning always came, the tin basins, the smell of soap, the long, sunlit, monotonous day.
…
Then her body relaxed and she lay and did not think of anything, for there is peace in despair in exactly the same way as there is despair in peace. Everything in her body relaxed. She did not make any more plans, she just lay there.

A Solid House
She remembered playing hide-and-seek in a cellar very like this one long ago. Curious, that hid-and-seek. It started well. You picked your side (I pick you, I pick you), then suddenly, in the middle, something horrible happened. Everything changed and became horrible and meaningless. But still it went on. You hid, or you ran with a red face, pretending you knew what it was all about. The boys showed off, became brutal; the girls trotted along, imitating, trying to keep up, but with sidelong looks, sudden fits of giggling, which often ended in tears.
…
It was a glittering, glaring day outside, the sky blown blue. A heartless, early spring day – acid, like an unripe gooseberry. There was a cold yellow light on the paved garden and the tidy, empty flower beds and on the high wall, where a ginger cat sat staring at birds. You could see neat paw-marks in the damp mould.
…
But instead of turning her head away she looked straight at Miss Spearman – straight into a hard bright glitter, hard and bright as the day outside. But behind the glitter there was surely something nebulous, dreamy, soft? Usually the sweetness and softness, if any, was displayed for all to see; but, hidden away, what continents of distrust, what icy seas of silence. Voyage to the Arctic regions …

The Sound of the River
If I could put it into words it might go, she was thinking. Sometimes you can put it into words – almost – and so get rid of it – almost. Sometimes you can tell yourself I’ll admit I was afraid today. I was afraid of the sleek smooth faces, the rat faces, the way they laughed in the cinema. I’m afraid of escalators and doll’s eyes. But there aren’t words for this fear. The words haven’t been invented.

Tea with an Artist
Verhausen’s studio was in the real Latin Quarter which lies to the north of the Montparnasse district and is shabbier and not cosmopolitan yet. It was an acient, narrow street of uneven houses, a dirty, beautiful street, full of mauve shadows. A policeman stood limply near the house, his expression that of contemplative stupefaction : a yellow dog lay stretched philosophically on the cobblestones of the roadway. The concierge said without interest that Monsieur Verhausen’s studio was on the quatrieme a droite. I toiled upwards.
…
… A girl seated on a sofa in a room with many mirrors held a glass of green liqueur. Dark-eyed, heavy-faced, with big, sturdy peasant’s limbs, she was entirely destitute of lightness or grace.
But all the poisonous charm of the life beyond the pale was in her pose, and in her smouldering eyes – all its deadly bitterness and fatigue in her fixed smile.
…
It was astonishing how the figure of the girl on the sofa stayed in my mind : it blended with the coming night, the scent of Paris and the hard blare of the gramophone. And I said to myself : ‘Is it possible that all that charm, such as it was, is gone?’
And then I remembered the way in which she had touched his cheek with her big hands. There was in that movement knowledge, and a certain sureness : as it were the ghost of a time when her business in life had been the consoling of men.

Mixing Cocktails
The afternoon dream is a materialistic one … It is of the days when one shall be plump and beautiful instead of pale and thin : perfectly behaved instead of awkward …. When one will wear seeping dresses and feathered hats and put gloves on with ease and delight … And of course, of one’s marriage “the dark moustache and perfectly creased trousers … Vague, that.
The veranda gets dark very quickly. The sun sets : at once night and the fireflies.
A warm, velvety, sweet-smelling night, but frightening and disturbing if one is alone in the hammock. Ann Twist, our cook, the old obeah woman has told me: ‘You all must’n look too much at de moon …’
If you fall asleep in the moonlight your are bewitched, it seems … the moon does bad things to you if it shines on you when you sleep. Repeated often …
So, shivering a little, I go into the room for the comfort of my father working out his chess problem form the Times Weekly Edition. Then comes my nightly duty mixing cocktails.
In spite of my absentmindedness I mix cocktails very well and swizzle them better (our cocktails, in the West Indies, are drunk frothing, and the instrument with which one froths them is called a swizzle-stick) than anyone else in the house.
I measure out angostura and gin, feeling important and happy, with an uncanny intuition as to how strong I must make each separate drink.
Here then is something I can do … Action, they say, is more worthy than dreaming …

Hunger
But I have clung and made huge efforts to pull myself up. Three times I have … acquired resources. Means? Has she means? She has means. I have been a mannequin. I have been … no : not what you think …
No good, any of it.
Well, you are doomed.
Once down you will never get up. Did anyone – did anybody, I wonder, ever get up … once down?
Every few months there is bound to be a crisis. Every crisis will find you weaker.
If I were Russian I should long ago have accepted Fate : had I been French I should long ago have discovered and taken the back door out. I mean no disrespect to the French. They are logical. Had I been … SENSIBLE I should have hung on to being a mannequin with what it implies. As it is, I have struggled on, not cleverly. Almost against my own will. Don’t I belong to the land of Lost Causes … England …
If I had a glass of wine I would drink to that : the best of toasts : To a Lost Cause : to all Lost Causes …
Oh! The relief of letting go : tumbling comfortably into the abyss …
Not such a terrible place after all. One day, no doubt, one will grow used to it. Lots of jolly people, here … No more effort.

[Mattea Gernentz · Rating 4 out of 5]

"'And do you like it here?' 'Yes, I like Paris much the best.' 'I suppose you feel at home,' Madame Tavernier said. Her voice was ironical. 'Like many people. There's something for every taste.' 'No, I don't feel particularly at home. That's not why I like it'" (Outside the Machine, 82).

Roughly 3.5 stars. Loved reading this on Pont Neuf in Paris under my favorite willow. <3

Rhys has mastered a prose so brutal and bare, full of passion without the trappings of exposition.

"Once, left alone in a very ornate studio, I went up to a plaster cast - the head of a man, one of those Greek heads - and kissed it, because it was so beautiful. Its mouth felt warm, not cold. It was smiling" (Till September Petronella, 16).

[Stephen Curran · Rating 4 out of 5]

Published in 1968, featuring stories that go back to 1927, almost anything in TIGERS ARE BETTER LOOKING could have been written yesterday. I think it's the directness the author's voice. It breaks though the barrier of time. 'The Sound of the River' (an account of the death of Jean Rhys's husband) even reminded me of Tobias Wolff. That story, and 'Till September Petronella", were my favourites in the collection.

Less successful, I thought, were the pieces selected from THE LEFT BANK: sketches more than stories, in the most part, put down with less assurance and control. But then, it was her first published book and her distinctive style was not yet fully developed.

[JacquiWine · Rating 5 out of 5]

I write about this book here:

https://jacquiwine.wordpress.com/2016...

Here's a brief excerpt:

many of Rhys’ stories were inspired by elements of her own life. Some of her women are eking out a living as chorus girls or artists’ models; others are confined to tawdry rooms, seeking refuge in drink and sleeping tablets. Several are hanging on to life by the thinnest of threads.

Petronella, the protagonist of Till September Petronella, has hit a bad patch in life. Feeling depressed following the departure of her friend to Paris, she takes a trip to the country to see a young man, an artist by the name of Marston. If little else it will make a change from her dark and dingy room in the city, a chance to experience some country air for a couple of weeks. However, on her arrival at the cottage, Petronella is made to feel very uncomfortable indeed. Marston’s friends, Julian and Frankie, are unkind to her, treating her with contempt and disrespect. In the end, Petronella decides to leave, even though the thought of returning to her Bloomsbury bedsit is utterly dispiriting.

‘[…] Cheer up,’ he said. ‘The world is big. There’s hope.’

‘Of course.’ But suddenly I saw the women’s long, scowling faces over their lupins and their poppies, and my room in Torrington Square and the iron bars of my bedstead, and I thought, ‘Not for me.’ (p. 28)

This story illustrates a number of themes associated with the vulnerable female protagonists in Rhys’ fiction: the utter absence of hope in their lives; their marginalisation from conventional society (note the mention of the women’s long, scowling faces in the passage above, a sure sign of disapproval from ‘respectable’ people, especially other women); and finally, their attractiveness to the opposite sex. As she is travelling back to London, Petronella attracts the attention of two men: the first is a kindly farmer, a chap who imagines Petronella as someone he could see in the city ‘and have a good time with’; the second is a man she meets at the taxi rank at Paddington Station. When the latter takes Petronella to dinner, a familiar scenario plays out.

And everything was exactly as I had expected. The knowing waiters, the touch of the ice-cold wine glass, the red plush chairs, the food you don’t notice, the gold-framed mirror, the bed in the room beyond that always looks as if its ostentatious whiteness hides dinginess. (p. 33)

The story ends on a poignant note, the memory of a time when Petronella felt utterly exposed. It’s a haunting image.

To read the rest of my review, click here:

https://jacquiwine.wordpress.com/2016...

[Andrew Guthrie · Rating 5 out of 5]

I can give this 5 stars because when Rhys was finally and fully acknowledged when in her 80's, she replied, apropos the sensibility of her stories and characters, "It's too late". I'm never sure if I've read all of Rhys and then I come across something unsure if I've already read it, but I hadn't in this case. Rhys is so dear to me, despite her bleakness, and I milked this book, putting it aside for a bit as I read something else.

What's exceptional in this collection is what appears to be a story in which the main character is a black woman (Let Them Call It Jazz) a circumstance which isn't immediately obvious, very subtle in the way the narrator is treated by various white British antagonists. And as is typical with Rhys, a woman who is at her wits ends, at one point seemingly being groomed by a pimp. Though somehow, as is typical with Rhys, the outcome isn't optimum but ongoing and courageous in a thread-bare kind of way.

[Anne Fenn · Rating 3 out of 5]

Really interesting to read another female writer in the vein of Katherine Mansfield, Dorothy Richardson, Virginia Woolf etc. That dreamlike flow of thoughts, feelings, it's visual, you can taste and smell it. Her characters are strange indeed, yet we're taken right inside their minds in a flash. I liked it but found it kept slipping through my fingers.

[Guilherme · Rating 5 out of 5]

With few exceptions, the stories are fast, razor sharp, sad without schmaltz, and funny. Rhys had an amazing eye and ear. The stories have that early 20th century coked-out mania of Bulgakov or Eisenstein, but with Rhys you get the hangover too. That suicidal energy gets focused into a laser beam in "Vienne," which is outstanding.

[Alan Stuart · Rating 4 out of 5]

The stories in the first half of this collection are wonderful as are many in the selection from The Left Bank. The final story Vienne I found erratic and difficult to enjoy, although the end is worth reaching.

[Chas Bayfield · Rating 4 out of 5]

Really enjoyed this. The stories are widely differnet to one another; some are about middle class british women in mid century Paris, others are about colonial children in the Caribbean or London immigrants. A real mixed bag and at times pretty experimental

[Sarah · Rating 3 out of 5]

These are the type of stories where there’s more introspection than action. It also relies on the reader understanding the social mores and norms of the 1920s-1950s. So it’s situated in class, race and gender norms that are wildly out of date. And, I got a bit bored.

[Paul Kerschen]

I love her drawing, the economy with which she touches up her interior scenes.

[Rhonda · Rating 3 out of 5]

High modernism; requires plumbing.

[Moira McPartlin · Rating 4 out of 5]

I have been writing short stories recently and read this as a way to get back into the form. Classic Jean Rhys - never disappoints.

[Marco Moysén · Rating 1 out of 5]

Salvo por algunas cosas de cómo era la vida a principios del XX, es un libro bastante salteable. No me dejó ni una frase para recordar.

[Michael Ross]

7ish

[Isabel · Rating 3 out of 5]

the premise is really good but the writing is so slow

[Mary Richardson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Need a Jean Rhys barbie

[Debra · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read every one of Jean Rhys' novels between the ages of 18 and 22 because I couldn't get enough of her drunken, promiscuous and slightly bewildered heroines wandering through the early 20th century avant garde. Accidentally encountering this Guardian article online reminded me of her and of reading Voyage in the Dark in a London bedsit shortly after arriving there, feeling the romanticized exhilaration of alienation and feeling like Anna longing for sunshine in the midst of the judgmental English greyness. That article and those memories sent me searching through all three second hand book shops in my neighbourhood for these stories.

This book combines parts of two collections of short stories written four decades apart: Tigers are Better-Looking (1968) and The Left Bank (1927). The stories in Tigers are Better-Looking tend to be brilliantly constructed and utterly devastating. Like much of Rhys' writing they are about the limitations of female identity in a patriarchal world and about the limits of agency when you are forever told that you are the object of the story rather than the subject. A sense of futility underpins many of these stories, many of which feature characters who quite clearly seem to be suffering from depression and other forms of mental illness. When I was reading them I kept thinking that the miserable greyness of December was the wrong time to approach this subject matter.

My favourite three stories in this section of the book, Till September Petronella, Let Them Call it Jazz and the title story, are also significantly about multiple oppressions, that is the way that gender, race and class intersect in Rhys' heroines' (and in the title story, sexuality and Rhys' male hero's) experiences. Rhys has a gift for dialogue and I love the way her stories are filled with archaic slang - and the way she builds the sense of devastation by giving the characters around her protagonists the most horrendous things to say. It is through these horrendous statements, and Rhys' protagonists frequent inability to respond, or even feel, that Rhys lays bare these oppressions in action.

The selection of stories taken from the Left Bank vary quite a bit, with some being little more than sketches. Read in tandem with the later stories, they mostly provide a fascinating look at the development of Rhys' writing. They also provide a view into the European avant garde of the 1920s, with a few stories that reflect back to Rhys' childhood in the late 19th century Caribbean. To me, they read like a night of drinking, with the earlier stories reading quite lucidly and the later ones becoming increasingly scattered and disjointed until the booze-saturated Vienne which ends with the protagonist quite literally fleeing across Europe.

I think Jean Rhys was a brilliant writer and her work remains an important perspective on female identity. Her life, and the thinly disguised autobiography in the lives of her characters, is also amazing in its outlawness - in her refusal to behave 'well' or even obtain a modicum of anything approaching a domestic ideal of femininity. But, I have to say, now that I'm older and spend less time partying and being cool (primary activities of many of Rhys' characters), I find her writing less compelling. I want her characters to do *something* (anything) and to feel even slightly in control of their own destinies. Reading this also made me feel grateful to have been born almost 90 years after Rhys, at a time when women have more choices and when we have the language as a culture to discuss mental illness. Yes, this is book is amazing, but it is also extraordinarily depressing.

[C.S. Burrough · Rating 5 out of 5]

No Jean Rhys fan would want to let this priceless opportunity pass.

Included is her fateful, first ever published collection 'Stories from the Left Bank', a glimpse of the legend in the making, as a young aspiring novice writer - even then she had the intuitive brilliance that made her adored by her select, intimate following. That her lover Ford Maddox Ford originally published these was clearly no pillow favour - he genuinely saw a rare, unique voice that would echo down through the ages after he gave her that start.

In these earliest of her efforts, which brought her by chance into the arms of her future mentor and lover and kicked off her literary career, we see into the Paris of the 1920s, with its cobblestoned roads, quaint streetlights, underground clubs, bars and restaurants and the English and American arts circles inhabiting this time and place alongside the city's gritty, colourful native characters.

The more modern stories, written in her maturing years, are equally fascinating albeit for different reasons, her voice having gained greater distinction, her take on life the same as ever and her heels dug relentlessly into her own deeply personal literary ground.

Breathtaking work by one of our most underrated English language greats, a writer decades ahead of her time who yanks at your heartstrings and screams into your ear with a polite, understated whisper.

Like every one of her books, I ached to keep reading and mourned pathetically after finishing it. So much so that I returned to it three times and it still sits in my cupboard awaiting its next round someday.

[Paula Dembeck · Rating 4 out of 5]

A collection of short stories with themes of woman as underdogs, exploiting their sexuality. She wrote about woman as society’s victims, with all the passion and despair of losers. Stories are set in Paris, London and the Caribbean, all places she had lived. They conjure up the loneliness of the rented room, the regrets of a failed love affair and the temporary oblivion of alcohol. She wrote about woman in a style and mood that was ahead of her time and seems to be writing of her own life –she had three failed marriages and drifted in and out of a series of odd jobs.

[Lyann · Rating 5 out of 5]

one of my first books which was read to me by my mother and was used to teach me how to read Jean Rhys and as i grew older i kept on reading it , it was only till i was 12 that i could fully understand the book . Jean Rhys is one of the best author's from the Caribbean and attending the high school where she attended is a great honor knowing i am walking the same halls one of the most talented author walked

[Ruth Brumby · Rating 4 out of 5]

The first stories in this selection are perfect, but the second part with earlier stories just not quite so accomplished. She has an amazing ability to identify with different sorts of people and examine relationships based on cultural differences. For the time is is astounding that the women are the central protagonists and the men exist as seen by women.

[Theodora T. · Rating 3 out of 5]

I came acroos this book in a charity shop the other day and I bought it without knowing its extraordinary prose. I just couldn't put it down. I will definetely read more books written by Jean Rhys. Highly recommended.

[Anna]

I have a great copy of this. It has the craziest cover, all bright pink and psychedelic.