All I can do

Carole Angier

• Jean Rhys: Letters 1931-1966 edited by Francis Wyndham and Diana Melly
  Deutsch, 336 pp, £9.95, May 1984, ISBN 0 223 97567 2

Jean Rhys always said, and certainly believed, that she didn’t want to be a writer. She only wrote, she said, because she was unhappy, and when she was happy, as she was in her twenty years of marriage to her third husband, she didn’t write at all. Now comes this extraordinary book to prove that this simply wasn’t true. Jean was only half-like one of her heroines: passive, incompetent, decoratively doomed. Her letters show that she was a dedicated professional writer; that her third marriage covered some of the hardest years of her life; and that throughout it she never stopped writing, or trying desperately to write.