{I’ve finally gotten back to my computer over break—apologies!}

One thing that very much impacted me on my way back through Rhys’s stories, especially “Till September Petronella,” is the way that public space is treated. Or rather, how public space treats the protagonist. There are explicitly antagonistic moments, like “No Models, No Hawkers”—a definite statement about how the metropolitan anonymous environ categorizes, simplifies, and excludes its outsiders.

But there are also more atmospheric moments, like in the story’s opening, when there “was a barrel organ playing…all the tunes I liked.” We realize shortly that this is actually a moment of reprieve, a brief oasis: the protagonist likes music, finds small bits of solace there, but in general has the sense that her colorless London is “spiteful.” Being in public is a continual performance for the speaker—maybe the accompaniment of church bells and barrel organs is something like a soundtrack emphasizing that performance. London is home—“And just for a while [being glad to be back] bears you up”—but not a home where the protagonist can be at ease. “You get round the corner,” she says, “and it lets you drop.”

The sense of ongoing, draining public performance is one of the underlying betrayals in the story: even the members of the small, disintegrating party on their retreat aren’t really in private. They’re performing class, privilege, power over one another, and in that context, there’s no real chance for intimacy. The story’s most intimate moments are probably the protagonist’s kiss with her reflection, or her silently moving through the house with her memories of Estelle. Her private self is dominated by the imperative to achieve that public performance successfully—and the failure in one literal performance is a telling tether for the rest of her public identity. The ways in which women were allowed to present and perform their identity publicly—putting on makeup in public, riding bicycles—was only recently shifting, and Rhys’s women characters feel painfully mired in past standards, performances, and limitations, even if they have been ostensibly revised and relaxed.