SOURCE: "From The Left Bank to Sleep It Off, Lady: Other Visions of Disordered Life," in Jean Rhys, Frederick Ungar Publishing Co., 1985, pp. 113-33.

In the following excerpt, Davidson discusses the importance of Rhys 's short fiction within her overall body of work.

Jean Rhys, it will be remembered, wrote short stories as well as novels. Her first book was The Left Bank and Other Stories. Her last creative works were two collections of short fiction, Tigers Are Better-Looking and Sleep It Off, Lady. These three volumes bracket her five novels, but they also parallel them, for both the first stories and the final ones evince, as I will subsequently demonstrate, Rhys's characteristic craft and control and are surprisingly effective in capturing, often in very short compass, the same idiosyncratic view of life that informs her longer fictions. The Left Bank is therefore (and despite some weaknesses in...