The Left Bank (1927)

Rhys's first book was a collection of short fiction, a common apprenticeship among novelists. In these early stories, she established major characteristics of her style. She continued to write short fiction all her life.

The collection consists of twenty-two stories, some very brief. Though the title indicates the bohemian, intellectual, artistic Paris that Rhys experienced most with Ford, there are pieces set in or which refer to the Caribbean (“Mixing Cocktails,” “Again the Antilles” and “Trio”). In “La Grosse Fifi,” the central character's name is Roseau, the capital of Dominica. “Trio,” in its Antillean exile theme, is the bridge to two Dominican memoir pieces, “Mixing Cocktails” and “Again the Antilles.” But if the Caribbean is an important point of reference in this collection, Paris is central. To be there in the early 1920s as an artist was to be at the birth of High Modernism, and even though Rhys was never a joiner of groups or movements, literary or not, her association with Ford temporarily put her right in the center of parties and literary discussions in cafés and restaurants such as the famous Café du Dôme (more simply Le Dôme), mentioned at the opening of “The Blue Bird.” Rhys identified Montparnasse as “Chelsea, London, with a large dash of Greenwich Village, New York, to liven it, and a slight sprinkling of Moscow, Christiania and even of Paris to give incongruous local colourings” (CS:16–17). Rhys had not visited the US at that time, but Greenwich Village was often compared to Montparnasse by cosmopolitan people who knew both.