LoveReading Says
LoveReading Says
'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 Her childish dreams have been replaced by harsh reality. 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.
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Voyage in the Dark Synopsis
'A wonderful bitter-sweet book, written with disarming simplicity' Esther Freud '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 Her childish dreams have been replaced by harsh reality. 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.
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Press Reviews
Jean Rhys Press Reviews
[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 - The New Yorker
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 The kind of book you want to stand up and applaud -- Caryl Phillips Prescient and technically astonishing -- Geoff Dyer - GQ
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About Jean Rhys
Jean Rhys (1890-1979) is best known for her novel, Wide Sargasso Sea, which was published in 1966 when she was 76. Rhys's life was profoundly marked by a sense of exile, loss, and alienation-dominant themes in her novels and short stories. Despite critical acclaim at the end of her life, Rhys died in 1979 still doubting the merit of her work.
Rhys was born Ella Gwendolen Rhys Williams on August 24, 1890 in Roseau, on the Caribbean island of Dominica. Her father, Rhys Williams, was a Welshman who had been trained in London as a doctor and emigrated to the colonies. Her mother, Minna Lockhart, was a third-generation Dominican Creole.
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