Voyage in the Dark - Softcover

Rhys, Jean

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0140089144 ISBN 13: 9780140089141

Publisher: Penguin Classics, 1987

Synopsis

Brought to life with startling autobiographical detail, Jean Rhys's Good Morning Midnight is a poignant portrait of a woman fighting to retain her integrity after being set adrift in a foreign country. This Penguin Classics edition includes an introduction by Carole Angier. 'It was as if a curtain had fallen, hiding everything I had ever known, ' says Anna Morgan, eighteen years old and catapulted to England from the West Indies after the death of her beloved father. Working as a chorus girl, Anna drifts into the demi-monde of Edwardian London. But there, dismayed by the unfamiliar cold and greyness, she is absolutely alone and unconsciously floating from innocence to harsh experience. Her childish dreams have been replaced by the harsher reality of living in a man's world, where all charity has its price Voyage in the Dark was first published in 1934, but it could have been written today. It is the story of an unhappy love affair, a portrait of a hypocritical society, and an exploration of exile and breakdown; all written in Jean Rhys's hauntingly simple and beautiful style. Jean Rhys (1894-1979) was born in Dominica. Coming to England aged 16, she drifted into various jobs before moving to Paris, where she began writing and was 'discovered' by Ford Madox Ford. Her novels, often portraying women as underdogs out to exploit their sexualities, were ahead of their time and only modestly successful. From 1939 (when Good Morning, Midnight was written) onwards she lived reclusively, and was largely forgotten when she made a sensational comeback with her account of Jane Eyre's Bertha Rochester, Wide Sargasso Sea, in 1966. If you enjoyed Voyage in the Dark, you might like James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, also available in Penguin Classics. 'A wonderful bitter-sweet book, written with disarming simplicity' Esther Freud, Express 'Her eloquence in the language of human sexual transactions is chilling, cynical, and surprisingly moving' A.L. Kennedy

About this title

Review

Every so often someone comes along whose prose style is so alert and fresh, so remote from the mainstream idiom of English social fiction that is seems miraculous that they should be able to write like that and be British too. Jean Rhys is such a writer.--Jonathan Raban [Jean Rhys's novels] have the quality of the best books by seeming to have written themselves, and reading them one flinches at truth after truth.--Howard Moss Miss Rhys has not often been more steadily successful than in her account of Anna Morgan's quite ordinary tragedy. . . . Miss Rhys has done a nearly perfect job.--T. P., Jr.

About the Author

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.

About this edition

• Publisher: Penguin Classics
• Publication date: 1987
• ISBN 10: 0140089144
• ISBN 13: 9780140089141
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 160