The Left Bank and Other Stories

The Left Bank and Other Stories
First edition
PublisherJonathan Cape, Harper & Brothers
Publication date
1927
Media typePrint (hardback)


The Left Bank and Other Stories is the first collection of short stories and literary debut of Dominican author Jean Rhys. It was first published by Jonathan Cape (London) and Harper & Brothers (New York) in 1927, and contained a preface by Ford Madox Ford.[1][2]

The original subtitle of the collection was "sketches and studies of present-day Bohemian Paris".[3][4][5]

Most of the twenty-two stories are impressionistic vignettes based on Rhys's own life experiences in and around the Left Bank of Paris. Some ("Mixing Cocktails and "Again the Antilles") are drawn from Rhys's early years in Dominica.[6][7] The final story, Vienne, is based on her post-World War I life in Vienna with first husband Jean Lenglet, and was originally published in The Transatlantic Review in 1924.[8][9]

Publication of The Left Bank and Other Stories was sponsored by Rhys's lover and literary mentor, Ford Madox Ford, sending the stories to his London contact, influential publisher's reader Edward Garnett.[10][11][12] The book was well received by critics on its initial release, establishing Rhys's early writing career.[13]

The book went out of print during Rhys's 1939-1966 period of obscurity but, following the resurgence of her career due to Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), selections from The Left Bank were republished in part by André Deutsch in Tigers are Better-Looking (1968), which included nine of the original twenty-two stories.[14] The volumw was next republished 1976 by W. W. Norton & Company, then again after Rhys's death by Penguin Classics incorporated into a wider compilation entitled Jean Rhys, The Collected Short Stories.[15][16]

Stories

  • "Illusion"
  • "A Spiritualist"
  • "From A French Prison"
  • "In a Café"
  • "Tout Montparnasse and a Lady"
  • "Mannequin"
  • "In the Luxembourg Gardens"
  • "Tea with an Artist"
  • "Trio"
  • "Mixing Cocktails"
  • "Again the Antilles"
  • "Hunger"
  • "Discourse of a Lady Standing a Dinner to a Down-and-Out Friend"
  • "A Night"
  • "In the Rue de l'Arivée"
  • "Learning to be a Mother"
  • "The Blue Bird"
  • "The Grey Day"
  • "The Sidi"
  • "At The Villa d'Or"
  • "La Grosse Fifi"
  • "Vienne"

Retrospective appraisal

Biographer Carole Angier reports that this first volume of short stories garnered Rhys significant critical approval.[17]

Literary critic Rayner Heppenstall deems Rhys’s pieces in The Left Bank to be “less than brilliant.”[18]

[M]uch of the collection] is the merest reportage (italics), though I don’t suppose it was called that then. It is less than brilliant. Pace (italics) her most dedicated admirers, I don’t think that sharpness of either eye or ear were ever Miss Rhys’s most conspicuous gifts.”[19]

Evelyn Toynton in The American Scholar praises the “mocking lucidity” with which Rhys depicted the sexual and social degradations of her female protagonists, adding this caveat

Certainly her books are not noteworthy for their subject matter alone. She wrote some of the most graceful prose of the century; she wrote as though she had no skin, in an artless seeming voice that could be achieved only through extraordinary artistry.”[20]

Rhys’s short fiction in The Left Bank is notable for the range of narrative devices she deploys. Half of the stories are told by women, both explicitly and inferred by dialogue, as well as participant and nonparticipant narrators. The point-of-view is often that of limited omnicent.[21]

The female narrators in these stories escort the reader through the Bohemian settings of her wealthy benefactors and lovers:

They are usually, in a certain sense, knowledgeable [and] privy to some kinds of special information…But this knowledge is strictly limited to external factors, to social mores, or the accepted meanings of words…Rhys’s plots are traditional in their linear chronology. [22]

Footnotes

  1. ^ Malcolm and Malcolm, 1996 p. 133-134: Selected Bibliography
  2. ^ Seymour, 2022 p. 11: See footnote for correct title of book
  3. ^ Rhys, Jean (1927). The left bank, and other stories. London: Jonathan Cape. OCLC 221121811.
  4. ^ Rhys, Jean (1927). The left bank: and other stories. New York; London: Harper & Brothers. OCLC 1132905154.
  5. ^ Malcolm and Malcolm, 1996 p. 5: “Ford indicates that the author will be…a guide the Bohemia of the stories’s settings.”
  6. ^ Malcolm and Malcolm, 1996 p. 11: “Contemporary critics…frequenctly described [the stories] as vignettes rather than stories proper.”
  7. ^ Midori Saito, The Lost Motherland? Image of the Caribbean in the Early Works of Jean Rhys: Left Bank and Voyage in the Dark, The University of the West Indies, 2004.
  8. ^ Angier, Carole, 1943- (February 2011). Jean Rhys: life and work. London. ISBN 978-0-571-27641-7. OCLC 727028081.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link) CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link) CS1 maint: numeric names: authors list (link)
  9. ^ Savory, Elaine. (2009). The Cambridge introduction to Jean Rhys. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-511-71960-8. OCLC 611066786.
  10. ^ Pizzichini, Lilian, 1965- (2009). The blue hour: a life of Jean Rhys (1st ed.). New York: W.W. Norton & Co. ISBN 978-0-393-05803-1. OCLC 283802817.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link) CS1 maint: numeric names: authors list (link)
  11. ^ Power, Chris (2014-04-14). "A brief survey of the short story: Jean Rhys". The Guardian. ISSN 0261-3077. Retrieved 2020-04-23.
  12. ^ "How Jean Rhys became a writer » Wide Sargasso Sea Study Guide from Crossref-it.info". crossref-it.info. Retrieved 2020-04-23.
  13. ^ "Miss Rhys's Short Stories; The Left Bank, and Other Stories. By Jean Rhys. With a Preface by Ford Madox Ford. 256 pp. New York: Harper & Bros. $2. Latest Works Of Fiction". The New York Times. 1927-12-11. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved 2020-04-24.
  14. ^ Rhys, Jean (1968). Tigers are better-looking. Deutsch. OCLC 656160665.
  15. ^ Rhys, Jean (1976). Jean Rhys; the collected short stories. Norton. OCLC 17966455.
  16. ^ "From rum to gay - British literature". TLS. Retrieved 2020-04-23.
  17. ^ Angier, 1990 p. 164: “...for a first collection, it was quite widely and well reviewed.”
  18. ^ Heppenstall, 1968 p. 124
  19. ^ Heppenstall, 1968: Italics in original.
  20. ^ Toynton, 1992 p. 300
  21. ^ Malcolm and Malcolm, 1996 p. 3: “...her stories display a remarkable resourcefulness in narration.” And p.4: On point-of-view.
  22. ^ Malcolm and Malcolm, 1996 p. 11

Sources

Further reading

  • Angier, Carole, Jean Rhys: Life and Work, London, André Deutsch, 1990
  • Pizzichini, Lilian, The Blue Hour: A Life of Jean Rhys, New York, W. W. Norton & Company, 2009
  • Frickey, Pierrette M, Critical Perspectives on Jean Rhys, Washington, DC, Lynne Rienner Publishers, 1990
  • Rhys, Jean, Smile Please: An Unfinished Autobiography, London, André Deutsch, 1979
allikas: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Left_Bank_and_Other_Stories