Jean Rhys may be best known as the author of Wide Sargasso Sea and other novels. But she was as accomplished a short story writer as a novelist. The Collected Short Stories brings all of Jean Rhy's stories together in one volume. Informed by the places she lived and the people she knew, these stories, set in London, Paris, and the Caribbean, hold and haunt the reader because they call up emotions, places, atmosphere, even physical sensations, with a powerful freshness. They are, as Ford Madox Ford writes, "extraordinarily distinguished by the rendering of passion."

In 1930s Paris, where one cheap hotel room is very like another, a young woman is teaching herself indifference. She has escaped personal tragedy and has come to France to find courage and seek independence. She tells herself to expect nothing, especially not kindness, least of all from men. Tomorrow, she resolves, she will dye her hair blonde.