Sleep It Off, Lady

Sleep It Off, Lady is a 1976 collection of short stories by Dominican-British author Jean Rhys, best known for her 1966 novel Wide Sargasso Sea. The stories of Sleep It Off, Lady are set in Dominica, Paris, and London. Some are autobiographical, and many tackle themes of sex, sexual inequality, and the meaning of womanhood in the early twentieth century (the stories are set between 1899 and 1975). Rhys, who was awarded the Order of the British Empire for her achievements in fiction, is widely regarded as one of the major writers of the late colonial era in British literature.

The collection’s first story introduces the recurring themes of sex, gender, and race. Seven-year-old British-Dominican Rosalie develops a crush on her neighbor Mr. Ramage, “a handsome man in tropical kit, white suit, red cummerbund, solar topee.” However, to the adults in her life, the neighbor is “nasty beastly horrible Ramage,” who violates the island’s racial codes by marrying a “colored girl.” After a confrontation with the local black population, Ramage shoots himself, leaving only Rosalie to mourn him.

In “Goodbye Marcus, Goodbye Rose,” Captain Cardew and his wife summer in Dominica. The Captain takes a shine to twelve-year-old local girl Phoebe. One day, he touches her breast and begins to talk to her about love and sex. His wife becomes suspicious and the Cardews depart, but Phoebe’s life is changed forever: she is a “wicked girl” now, who has sinned in thought and can no longer be content with her girlish dreams of marriage and children.



In “The Bishop’s Feast,” a returnee to Dominica is invited to watch the new Bishop’s enthronement, before spending a week on the island’s leeward coast. “Heat” tells the story of the 1902 eruption of Mount Pelée. The story in the collection that most explicitly addresses racial tensions in Dominica is “Fishy Waters.” An English carpenter, Jimmy Longa, is on trial for threatening to saw in half a young black girl, who has also been badly beaten. Longa claims that the threat was a joke and that the beating wasn’t him. The key witness is respectable Mr. Penrice, a well-to-do family man. As the story progresses, the reader comes to see that Penrice is probably the culprit of the girl’s injuries and that Longa has been framed.

The next story, “Overture and Beginners Please,” introduces Elsa, a Caribbean immigrant to England who is the protagonist of the next four stories. In “Overture,” she attends a Cambridge boarding school and falls in love with acting. In “Before the Deluge,” she meets a dazzlingly beautiful actor whose beauty somehow doesn’t seem to carry across to the audience. Even worse, the girl faints whenever anything goes wrong. Elsa is wooed by an English gentleman in “On Not Shooting Sitting Birds,” only to be rejected by him when he hears of her involvement in unsportsmanlike hunting practices back home. In “Kikimora,” Elsa is married, but she learns that the title character—a cat—is far more perceptive than a husband.

A young couple, Suzy and Gilbert, wander the streets of Paris in “Night Out 1925.” In a Paris restaurant, “The Chevalier of the Place Blanche,” a travel agent’s clerk and embezzler, needs money to pay off a debt, but out of pride, he refuses English girl Margaret’s offer of help.



“The Insect World” is set during the London Blitz: Audrey begins to believe that the city is populated by parasitic insects, jiggers, which get “in under skin when don’t know it” to lay their eggs. In “Rapunzel, Rapunzel,” a hospital inpatient befriends the long-haired Australian woman in the next bed. While the narrator suffers boredom and creeping sadness, the Australian woman has a cruel encounter with a barber. “Who Knows What’s Up in the Attic?” pits a holidaymaker in the south of England against a clothing salesman.

In the collection’s title story, never-married seventy-year-old Miss Verney lives alone. One day, she decides she wants to get rid of a hideous, tumble-down old shed on her property. However, there is a problem: a huge rat keeps chasing her off. When she complains to neighbors, they assume the rat is an alcoholic hallucination. No one will help her destroy the rat, and when she tries to take it on herself and gets hurt, no one comes to her aid. Neighbor girl Deena assumes the collapsed Miss Verney is drunk and tells her to “Sleep it off, lady!” The story ends with Miss Verney in heap by the dustbin, “with her legs stretched out, surrounded by torn paper and eggshells. Her skirt had ridden up and there was a slice of stale bread on her bare knee.”

In the final story, “I Used to Live Here Once,” just four hundred words long, the narrator finds herself crossing a familiar stream on the way to her childhood home, now occupied by other children. As the children fail to respond to her, she realizes she is dead.