Smile Please: An Unfinished Autobiography

First edition, first impression. 172pp. Red cloth-covered boards with gilt stamped lettering to spine  8vo  Cloth is a little brushed, gently rounded at corners and spine ends.  Gift inscription neatly inked on the front free endpaper else internally neat, clean, bright and tight.  In its original dust wrapper, a little shelf worn and gently bumped along the upper edge, slightly faded.  

Dominican-born Jean Rhys was a British novelist, mentored by Ford Madox Ford with whom she had an affair in the 1920s.  Her early novels (eg Left-bank and Other Stories, Quartet, etc) found little commercial or critical success but following the publication of Wide sargasso Sea – a sort of prequel to Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre – she saw a surge in popularity and many of her early works were republished and reassessed.  She began writing her autobiography only months before her death at the age of 88 and its was published posthumously and incomplete in 1979.