The narrative includes retrospective memories: images of the ‘coloured’ world of Jamaica, the continuous sounds of the forest, the town, the heat and strangeness of that world that now appears a dream. Anna is an almost somnolent character, gliding through this incomprehensible world only aware of resentment and her growing longing for her homeland. Coming to England from the West Indies, she encounters the monotonous, grey, grinding cold of England its paltry hyprocisy and hatred of youth and sexual exuberance. The novel is entirely narrated by 19 year old Anna Morgan, without any third person narration and with a deliberately mono-syllabic vocabulary. However the piece that caught my attention was nothing to do with women’s representation, or indeed infanticide (though the novel culminates in an abortion which I’m sure for some people is on a par). This provoked much vitriol over Rhys’s alleged infanticide, and her belated status as a feminist icon. I’d only read Wide Sargasso Sea before, but one of my mature students had raved about Rhys’ earlier works and I’ve always been intrigued by Rhys in the wake of her biography in the late 1990s. I read Jean Rhys’ Voyage in the Dark’(1934) the other night in a bout of insomnia.
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