But, like many of the compelling stories from her life, it both invites and resists analysis: there is something defiantly unknowable at its core. It captures something of her: eccentric, demanding, haunted by her past, and committed to looking herself dead in the eye – a commitment that might well resemble self-absorption. This small but novelistic detail from Miranda Seymour’s immersive new biography of Rhys feels suggestive. Reflecting on the incident almost 40 years later, he said: “I still don’t have a clue what it was all about.” Her puzzled friend left the room, leaving Rhys alone, staring at her made-up face in the mirror. While he rouged her lips and cheeks, Rhys watched silently, sipping a martini once the job was done, she asked him to leave. In 1977, when she was in her late eighties, the novelist Jean Rhys asked an actor to paint her face with the stage make-up she had worn as a young actress.
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