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Jean Rhys was born in Dominica in 1894. After arriving in England aged sixteen, she became a chorus girl and drifted between different jobs before moving to Paris, where she started to write in the late 1920s. She published a story collection and four novels, after which she disappeared from view and lived reclusively for many years. In 1966 she made a sensational comeback with her masterpiece, Wide Sargasso Sea, written in difficult circumstances over a long period. Rhys died in 1979.
This is Jean Rhys' first novel (1928), not as strong a book as Good Morning, Midnight (1970, p. 131) but firmer in narrative design than Voyage in the Dark. And even if her heroine, always the same haphazard young woman at the loose end of life, is a little younger and to begin with more hopeful, there are other points of similar recognition: Paris, The unvarying background. Knowing waiters, clouds of smoke, the smell of drink. - the cafes and little hotels frequented by impermanent drifters, watchers. This time she's Marya who has married the charming if improvident Stephan, now arrested and jailed for selling stolen pictures, leaving her without a centime. She is taken in as a protegee by an English couple, the Heidlers, and quickly becomes a love object for H.J., a hate object for his wife, and the easy victim of both. The story has its own febrile fascination and once again Miss Rhys' dragonfly perceptions skim familiar surfaces (fear, loneliness, abandonment) with a momentary insistence and involvement. (Kirkus Reviews)
