Jean Rhys - Later Years

Later Years

Rhys remained characteristically unimpressed by her sudden, belated ascent to literary fame, commenting, 'It has come too late'. In a brief interview shortly before her death, Rhys questioned whether any novelist, not least herself, could ever be happy for any length of time. She said that: "If I could choose I would rather be happy than write ... If I could live my life all over again, and choose ... ". She died in Exeter on 14 May 1979 before completing her autobiography. In 1979, the incomplete text appeared posthumously under the title Smile Please: An Unfinished Autobiography.

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