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.