The Left Bank

Abstract

Written under the tutelage of Ford Madox Ford and published with his elaborate, if not very well-focused preface, The Left Bank¹ is a collection of twenty-two stories and sketches which oscillate between themes and subjects of poverty, loneliness, fear of growing old, loss of beauty, displacement, women as victims of men’s desires and of their own fragility and vanity. Frequently lacking in subtlety or depth, the stories nevertheless contain in embryo the themes and ideas which will dominate Rhys’s novels. Too unformed to be termed an introduction to all of Rhys’s subsequent work, the collection can, however, be seen as a kind of loosely structured overture to her later fiction. This analogy is suggested not merely as a critical strategy, but also because these earliest pieces, some of them no more than prose fragments really, reveal the essential attitude and sensibility toward the world underlying all her work. Already these stories and sketches show Rhys’s uncanny ability to discover meaning in the selection of event or action. The reader of her novels is again and again confronted with characters in the same dire circumstances or conditions as those introduced in The Left Bank, but in her subsequent work we become conscious of a greater refinement of imagination and social intelligence.