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.
Read more about this topic: Jean Rhys
Famous quotes containing the word years:
“These young women have had four years of very special space.... This has been special space. This has been safe space. But when they graduate, they will begin to deal on a daily basis, all day long, month after month, year after year, with the realities that still haunt our nation.”
—Johnnetta Betsch Cole (b. 1936)
“The years seemed to stretch before her like the land: spring, summer, autumn, winter, spring; always the same patient fields, the patient little trees, the patient lives; always the same yearning; the same pulling at the chain—until the instinct to live had torn itself and bled and weakened for the last time, until the chain secured a dead woman, who might cautiously be released.”
—Willa Cather (1873–1947)