Abstract

Jean Rhys's Smile, Please: An Unfinished Autobiography was not actually written by Rhys, but by novelist David Plante in an act that can only be characterized as ghostwriting. This essay theorizes ghostwriting in the context of autobiography and life writing, and shows how the ghostwriting process results in contested layers of written and spoken texts. Rhys resists the ghostwriter's displacement of her spoken text by quoting her own written texts verbatim throughout Smile, Please, thus in effect auto-ghostwriting her autobiography.

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