Quartet was published by Chatto & Windus in September 1928 under the title Postures (changed to Quartet for the 1929 American edition by Simon & Schuster). It is Jean Rhys’s first novel and draws directly — with barely concealed fury — on her affair with Ford Madox Ford in 1924-1925, while her first husband Jan Lenglet was imprisoned for financial crimes. It is a study of how bohemian Paris could be as exploitative as bourgeois England, how artistic patronage could mask sexual predation, and how a woman without money or nationality was vulnerable to anyone who offered shelter.
The Novel
Marya Zelli — young, English, married to a Polish man of dubious profession — is stranded in Paris when her husband Stephan is arrested and imprisoned. The Heidlers — H.J. Heidler, an influential English art dealer, and his wife Lois — take Marya into their home. H.J. begins an affair with Marya while Lois watches, furious but complicit. The arrangement is presented as generosity: they are helping a woman in distress. In reality, H.J. is collecting a woman he desires, and Lois is maintaining her marriage by containing the affair within her sight.
Marya’s position is impossible. She is dependent on the Heidlers for housing, money, introductions. She is genuinely attracted to H.J. — or at least to the warmth and security he represents. But she is also being used: sexually by H.J., psychologically by Lois, and abandoned when H.J. loses interest. The novel’s ending leaves Marya destroyed — beaten by her released husband, abandoned by her lover, alone in Paris with nothing.
The Roman à Clef
The identifications are unmistakable. H.J. Heidler is Ford Madox Ford — editor of the English Review and the Transatlantic Review, author of The Good Soldier, patron and predator. Lois Heidler is Stella Bowen, Ford’s long-suffering partner. Marya is Rhys herself. Stephan is Jan Lenglet.
Ford’s literary circle was scandalized. Stella Bowen wrote her own account in Drawn from Life (1940), presenting the affair from the other woman’s perspective — as Ford’s folly and Rhys’s manipulation. The truth, as always in such triangles, is impossible to adjudicate from outside.
What is beyond dispute is the quality of the novel. Whatever its autobiographical sources, Quartet succeeds as fiction — its rendering of Marya’s helplessness, her half-conscious complicity in her own exploitation, and the particular cruelty of generosity offered with strings is psychologically devastating.
Collecting Quartet
First edition as Postures (Chatto & Windus, London, 1928): The true first edition, published under the original title. Blue cloth binding.
Identification points:
- Chatto & Windus imprint
- Title: Postures
- “First published 1928” stated
- 228 pages
Market values: Fine copies in dust jacket bring $3,000–$8,000. As Rhys’s first novel under its original title, this is the most sought-after Rhys first edition after Wide Sargasso Sea.
Without jacket: $500–$1,500.
First American edition as Quartet (Simon & Schuster, New York, 1929): Published under the title that would become standard. $500–$1,500 in jacket.
The novel’s connection to Ford Madox Ford adds collecting interest from Ford collectors and scholars of literary Paris in the 1920s. It is a book about the intersection of sex, power, and literary influence — collected by enthusiasts of all three subjects.