Although I have criticized those autobiographical readings of Rhys’ work that identify her literally with her heroines and reduce the scope of her work to an individual plight, in the sense that she draws on the material of her own life, an autobiographical writer is of course what she is. As has been pointed out, the stories in The Left Bank (1927) are mainly vignettes based on her experience in Paris, a couple go back to her Dominican childhood and ‘Vienne’ draws on an early period in her marriage to Jean Lenglet. The source of the plot of Quartet (1928) is her relationship with Ford Madox Ford while Lenglet was in prison for currency irregularities. The character of George Horsfield in After Leaving Mr Mackenzie (1930) appears to be based on her second husband, Leslie Tilden Smith, and Julia's relationship with her sister Norah draws on Rhys’ difficult relationship with her own sister Brenda. Voyage in the Dark (1934) is based on her affair with her first lover, Lancelot Grey Hugh Smith, and was first written as an autobiographical account some twenty-four years before it was published. The story of Sasha's marriage to Enno and the death of her baby son in Good Morning, Midnight (1939) draws once more on Rhys’ marriage to Lenglet. Even in Wide Sargasso Sea (1966) many of the details are drawn from her own Caribbean childhood. The short stories that appear in Tigers are Better Looking (1968) and in Sleep It Off Lady (1976) often use incidents in her life – ‘Let Them Call It Jazz’, for example, has the visit to Holloway, ‘Goodbye Marcus, Goodbye Rose’ an account of sexual molestation as a twelve-year-old, an experience which Coral Ann Howells and others have argued was a crucial determinant in Rhys’ psychological make-up. When she came to write her autobiography, Smile Please (published posthumously in 1979), she was anxious to avoid repeating incidents that she had already covered in her fiction, but in the end some appear. Anyone interested in parallels between Rhys’ life and fiction can consult Carole Angier's biography, where they are extensively documented.

I don't want to deny these parallels, though they are by no means exact, rather to shift the terms in which Rhys’ use of autobiography has been understood.