Book Review: Wide Sargasso Sea, by Jean Rhys (1966)

Original cover of Wide Sargasso Sea, by Jean Rhys, 1966.

Ella Williams, who wrote under the pen name Jean Rhys, 1970's.

Jean Rhys’ most famous novel is probably her last one: Wide Sargasso Sea, published in 1966 to much acclaim. There was a 27-year gap between her fourth novel, Good Morning, Midnight and Wide Sargasso Sea. What happened in between? As John Lennon wrote, “Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans.”

Rhys was a perfectionist in her writing, and she asked her publisher Diana Athill, in reference to Wide Sargasso Sea, “Why did you let me publish that book?” This was five years after the novel had been released. Rhys said, “It was not finished,” and proceeded to point out two words that she thought should have been removed from the text. One was “then,” and the other word was “quite.” Writers are an odd bunch. (Smile Please: An Unfinished Autobiography, by Jean Rhys, p.8)

Wide Sargasso Sea tells the story of the first wife of Rochester from Jane Eyre, the 1847 novel by Charlotte Bronte. Don’t worry, you don’t need to read Jane Eyre first. (I still haven’t read Jane Eyre.) That being said, I have no doubt that there are connections between the two novels that I missed, not being familiar with Jane Eyre.

It's difficult to compare Wide Sargasso Sea with Rhys’ other novels, since it is so different from them. Rhys’ previous four novels, Quartet, After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie, Voyage in the Dark, and Good Morning, Midnight are all similar in tone and subject matter—they could easily be read together as a quartet examining the life of the same main character. But the mood of Wide Sargasso Sea is markedly different—in part because the narrator shifts between Part One and Part Two of the novel, a brilliant idea.

Jean Rhys was the pen name of Ella Williams, who was born on the island of Dominica, then called the British Leeward Islands. (Fun fact: Dominica is one of only two countries that have purple on their flag. The other is Nicaragua.) She was sent to school in England at the age of 16, and she well understood the push and pull between two cultures that is an integral part of the plot of Wide Sargasso Sea.

I read the bulk of Wide Sargasso Sea in one day, and it’s a superb novel, and a testament to the talent and skill of Jean Rhys.

Book Review: Voyage in the Dark, by Jean Rhys (1934)

Paperback cover of Voyage in the Dark, by Jean Rhys, originally published in 1934. The evocative cover design is by Tim Gaydos. (Photo by Mark C. Taylor)

Ella Williams, who wrote under the pen name of Jean Rhys, 1890-1979.

Voyage in the Dark, published in 1934, was the third novel by Jean Rhys, the pen name of Ella Williams. The novels Quartet, also known as Postures, and After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie, preceded Voyage in the Dark, and, read with her fourth novel, Good Morning, Midnight, form a quartet of works that cover similar themes. All four books follow female protagonists through their travails. The women in all of these books do not have the education or the inner drive to attempt to make much of a career for themselves, and as a consequence, they are largely financially dependent on the kindness of male companions. These male companions may be amused by these women for a while, but marriage is not on their minds. 

The main character in Voyage in the Dark is Anna Morgan. As the novel opens, 18-year-old Anna is treading the boards as a chorus girl. In the town of Southsea, Anna and her friend Maudie meet two men. Walter, the man Anna is paired off with, expresses an interest in seeing her again when they are back in London. Walter ends up supporting Anna in London, and tries to help her “get on,” i.e., advance her career. When the much-older Walter inevitably tires of Anna and casts her aside, she must figure out what to do with herself. 

Like Rhys, Anna was born and raised on an island in the Caribbean. (Anna’s island remains unnamed in the novel; Rhys was born in Dominica.) Throughout the novel, Anna flashes back to life on the island, and how different it was from London. These are fascinating passages, and they add a lot to Anna’s backstory. Anna always feels like an outsider in English culture, and I would venture to guess that Rhys felt similarly. 

I want to report to you that I enjoyed Voyage in the Dark, but “enjoy” isn’t really the proper word for experiencing Jean Rhys’ fiction. As always, I appreciated her sharp, incisive language and her keen observation of the human condition. It’s obvious to modern readers that rather than being simply moody or melancholy, Anna is suffering from some sort of severe clinical depression. There are numerous passages that attest to this, but the following ones really stuck out to me:

“Vincent started off again about books.

I said, ‘I haven’t read any of these books you’re talking about. I hardly ever read.’

‘Well, what do you do with yourself all day?’ he said.

‘I don’t know,’ I said.” (P.86)

“For a week after Walter left I hadn’t gone out; I didn’t want to. What I liked was lying in bed till very late, because I felt tired all the time, and having something to eat in bed and then in the afternoon staying a long time in the bath.” (P.90)

“It’s funny when you feel as if you don’t want anything more in your life except to sleep, or else to lie without moving. That’s when you can hear time sliding past you, like water running.” (P.113)

As much as I wanted to scream at Anna that she was depressed and should see a doctor, I don’t know if seeking professional help for mental health issues in the 1913-14 time period of the novel would have been beneficial for her. Anna’s struggles with depression were another thing that she had in common with her creator. As Rhys said in a 1979 interview:

“When I was excited about life, I didn’t want to write at all. I’ve never written when I was happy. I didn’t want to. But I’ve never had a long period of being happy. Do you think anyone has? I think you can be peaceful for a long time. When I think about it, if I had to choose, I’d rather be happy than write. You see, there’s very little invention in my books. What came first with most of them was the wish to get rid of this awful sadness that weighed me down.” Jean Rhys, The Paris Review interview, 1979.

Like Rhys’ other female protagonists, Anna doesn’t seem to have a clear sense of what she wants out of life. Anna is somewhat passive; she’s much more acted upon by others than decisively acting for herself. When her life as Walter’s plaything is set up, she thinks:

“Of course, you get used to things, you get used to anything. It was as if I had always lived like that. Only sometimes, when I had got back home and was undressing to go to bed, I would think, ‘My God, this is a funny way to live. My God, how did this happen?’” (P.40)

Anna also has a somewhat unrealistic expectation of life:

“I don’t know how people live when they know exactly what’s going to happen to them each day. It seems to me it’s better to be dead than to live like that.” (P.75) 

Well, that’s harsh. And also not an attitude that is going to help you succeed in life. Life is repetition. That’s something that no one ever really tells you as you become an adult, but unless you have a really odd, fascinating job, much of life is the same every day. You will go to the same office/school/wherever you work and interact with many of the same people every single day. Then you’ll wake up and do it all again. Although to be fair to Anna, when I was 18 or 19 years old, I might have thought the same thing that she did. When you’re 18 or 19 years old you think that every day is pregnant with possibilities, and at some point you learn that’s not actually true. And that’s not necessarily a bad thing. If I didn’t have a pretty good idea of what was going to happen to me each day, I’d be worried sick. 

The first-person narration of Voyage in the Dark gives it a different feel from Rhys’ other early novels, and it also enables the reader to feel a more immediate connection to Anna. Voyage in the Dark feels more like a first novel than Quartet does, so I wonder if Voyage was written before and then set aside. The flashbacks to Anna’s life on the island also give the novel some extra texture, and throughout the book I was more conscious of place and culture as themes. I think Anna’s sense of being an outsider in English culture is part of the alienation and depression that she feels. 

Reading Voyage in the Dark immediately after Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent, I was struck by the negative portrayal of London in both novels. In The Secret Agent, the metropolis becomes a symbol for the modern, mechanized age, and its capitalistic excesses. In Voyage in the Dark, London is a gloomy place: “Everything was always so exactly alike—that was what I could never get used to. And the cold; and the houses all exactly alike, and the streets going north, south, east, west, all exactly alike.” (P.179) I doubt that Rhys was specifically influenced by Conrad in the way she describes London, but I would guess that he was a writer she admired, since she quotes from his novel Almayer’s Folly in After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie. And she may have felt an affinity for another foreign-born author who was an outsider to English culture. 

Voyage in the Dark is an example of spare modernism at its best, and Rhys' writing style makes the novel feel very contemporary. It's an excellent introduction to this often overlooked author. 

Book Review: After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie, by Jean Rhys (1931)

A very sexy cover of After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie, with a painting by Amedeo Modigliani.

Ella Williams, who wrote under the pen name of Jean Rhys.

Jean Rhys was the pen name of Ella Williams. Born in the Caribbean island of Dominica, Rhys lived most of her adult life in England. Rhys published several books, beginning with The Left Bank, a collection of short stories, in 1927. That was followed by a series of short novels over the next dozen years. Postures, later republished as Quartet, was published in 1928. (I reviewed Quartet here.) After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie, Rhys’ second novel, came out in 1931, and was followed by Voyage in the Dark in 1934, and Good Morning, Midnight in 1939. Although these books are now regarded as classics of modernism, at the time they didn’t exactly set the world on fire. After Good Morning, Midnight, Rhys disappeared from sight, enough so that a BBC producer who was producing a radio version of Good Morning, Midnight in the mid-1950’s actually took out ads in newspapers, asking about Rhys’ whereabouts. It turned out that Rhys was still alive. She published just two more books during her lifetime, the critically acclaimed Wide Sargasso Sea in 1966, which finally brought her out of obscurity, and Sleep it Off Lady, a collection of short stories which appeared in 1976. Rhys died in 1979 at the age of either 88 or 84. (The Penguin edition of After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie gives her birth year as 1894, Wikipedia says 1890.) 

Rhys’ novels from the 1920’s and 1930’s generally deal with the lives of women who are dependent on men for their financial security. I’ve read Quartet, After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie, and Good Morning, Midnight, and they all fit together very well. Rhys’ lead female characters don’t have enough education to find a profession, so they end up drifting from man to man, eking out an existence thanks to the generosity of their male companions. Rhys had a very interesting comment in her interview with The Paris Review in 1979, the year she died:

“When I was excited about life, I didn’t want to write at all. I’ve never written when I was happy. I didn’t want to. But I’ve never had a long period of being happy. Do you think anyone has? I think you can be peaceful for a long time. When I think about it, if I had to choose, I’d rather be happy than write. You see, there’s very little invention in my books. What came first with most of them was the wish to get rid of this awful sadness that weighed me down.” Jean Rhys, The Paris Review interview, 1979.

After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie tells the story of Julia Martin, who has, well, left Mr. Mackenzie as the novel opens. We follow Julia as the checks from Mr. Mackenzie suddenly stop arriving, and she returns to London after ten years in Paris. In London, Julia reckons with her sister Norah, who has been caring for their invalid mother, now at death’s door. 

I don’t want to give too much away by adding more plot summary, and anyway, After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie is not a novel that depends much on its plot. Of note to literary fans: in the novel there is a quote from Almayer’s Folly, Joseph Conrad’s first novel, published in 1895, which indicates that Conrad’s work must have been an influence on Rhys. Like Conrad, who was Polish by birth, Rhys no doubt felt herself an outsider to British culture.

There are many excellent quotes in After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie that demonstrate Jean Rhys’ keen observance of human nature. Some of my favorites are:

 “Her mind was a confusion of memory and imagination.” (p.9) 

“Once you started letting the instinct of pity degenerate from the general to the particular, life became completely impossible.” (p.34) 

“It was as if I were before a judge, and I were explaining that everything I had done had always been the only possible thing to do. And of course I forgot that it’s always so with everybody, isn’t it?” (p.40) 

“Perhaps the last ten years had been a dream; perhaps life, moving on for the rest of the world, had miraculously stood still for her.” (p.48) 

If you’re interested in modernism, or in great writing, you need to read Jean Rhys.

Note: Although my Penguin paperback of After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie gives the publishing date as 1930, other sources say 1931, including Carole Angier's biography Jean Rhys: Life and Work, so I've changed the date to 1931.