SOURCE: "The Best Living English Novelist," in The New York Times Book Review, March 17, 1974, pp. 6-7.

In the following appreciative survey of Rhys's works, Alvarez maintains that the "purity of Miss Rhys's style and her ability to be at once deadly serious and offhand make her books peculiarly timeless. "

When Jean Rhys published her first book, a collection of short stories called The Left Bank, in 1927, it came with an enthusiastic preface by Ford Madox Ford. He was presumably rather less enthusiastic about her first novel, Quartet, which appeared the next year. It is the story of a young woman, left penniless when her husband is sent to prison, who drifts into an affair with an older man, egged on by his crushingly understanding and emancipated wife. Writing of The Left Bank, Ford had praised his protegée's "passion for stating the case of the underdog." It turned...