SOURCE: Sternlicht, Sanford. “The Left Bank and Other Stories.” In Jean Rhys, pp. 22-31. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1997.

In the following essay, Sternlicht arranges the stories of The Left Bank and Other Stories into several classifications, which are based on the settings of the stories.

Rhys's first book, The Left Bank and Other Stories, is a collection of stories, published with an extraordinary self-serving preface by Ford Madox Ford, an egregious act of gender imperialism more than 20 pages long, with only 5 about Rhys. There is no story in the collection titled “The Left Bank”; that is really the title of Ford's preface: “Rive Gauche.” Rhys's work is the 22 pieces that constitute the “Other.” Perhaps the book should have been called Other Stories. Indeed, much of the collection is not set on the Left Bank; that is, the XIIIth arrondissement of Paris, the boulevard du Montparnasse area, with its...