Jean Rhys | Thornfield Hall

Jean Rhys’s second novel, After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie, published in 1931, is not her only novel of desperation. In a sense, her four early novels center on female despair. In After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie and the last of the four, Good Morning, Midnight, women past their first youth are stranded in Paris or London. Rhys thought After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie was her best novel, and I find it especially poignant.

Why, I wondered as I read this sordid, despairing novel, do I admire Julia Martin, the heroine of After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie? There is little to like about Julia: her beauty is waning, she has no job, and does little besides drink at cafes and go to the movies with strange men. After Mr. Mackenzie drops her, she teeters on the edge of prostitution. He politely sends her weekly checks for a while, but when they stop, how on earth will she get by?

Yes, how will we all get by? I remember hating my job so much in the ’90s that I vowed I would quit if Clinton got elected. Well, he did and I did – and I managed to keep going. Of course I couldn’t save. But, fortunately, one can’t see the future at that age.

Julia Martin can, unfortunately, see the future. But she is magnificent. She finds Mr. Mackenzie in a restaurant and slaps him for having his lawyer send a letter to fire her as his mistress and cut off the checks. And then she walks out of the restaurant, refusing to take the money he offers.

Rather like a Doris Lessing character, only much more down-and-out, Julia stays in her room for days at a time. Rhys writes, “Julia was not altogether unhappy. Locked in the room – especially when she was locked in her room – she felt safe. She read most of the time.”

The art of being a mistress, or at least a woman who attracts men, has much to do with appearance, but Julia doesn’t care that much anymore. “She made herself up elaborately and carefully; yet it was clear that what she was doing had long ceased to be a labour of love and had become partly a mechanical process, partly a substitute for the mask she would have liked to wear.”

The most poignant scenes take place when she returns to London to see her dying mother and her sister Norah, who is their mother’s caregiver. The visit is a disaster. The mother is no longer cognizant and does not recognize Julia, and Norah is exhausted and bitter. Nora is a spinster, while Julia has always been the glamorous one. And Rhys’s portrait of the spinster is glaring, cold, and merciless. We understand Norah, but she doesn’t understand Julia, and that is tragic for Julia, who has no friends.

I really love this novel. I’m neither a Julia nor a Norah, but they fascinate me, and also seem very real. But it is Julia we worry about. Norah inherits her mother’s house and also has friends. At the end, Julia even has a drink with Mr. Mackenzie. He tells her she needs a vacation, and she asks him for money.

“Nobody else knows me, but the street knows me.“ – Good Morning, Midnight

Jean Rhys’s heroines lead disturbingly empty lives. London, Paris, it hardly matters. They are unlucky and poor, and barely balance on the edge of the abyss. They cannot work, or if they can, they do not excel in the workplace.

In Good Morning, Midnight, published in 1938, the narrator, Sasha Jenson, is one of Rhys’s smart, incapable women. She has left London to rent a room in a hotel in Paris, and fills her days according to a time-table: she picks a place to eat at midday, a place to eat at night, and goes out for a drink or two at night.

Drinking is an integral part of Sasha’s life: she feels better if she drinks a little too much. Sasha is a highly intelligent alcoholic who understands her needs and her limits. She has hit bottom and has now clawed her way back up to a large room on the shabby top floor of a hotel, supported by a tiny inheritance. “Saved, rescued, fished-up, half-drowned, out of the deep, dark river, dry clothes, hair shampooed and set. Nobody would know I had ever been in it.”

But on her fourth night in Paris, she begins to cry after a friendly woman’s boyfriend kindly buys Sasha a drink. The friendly woman is not very sympathetic: “I understand. All the same…. Sometimes I’m just as unhappy as you are. But that’s not to say that I let everybody see it.”

Sasha promptly goes to the lavabo to finish her cry.

There is a lot of crying in Jean Rhys’s first four novels, Quartet, After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie, Voyage in the Dark, and Goodbye, Midnight. In a way these novels make up a series. The heroines have different problems but all live on the edge. Sasha used to be married: her husband left her after their baby died. Now she is completely on her own.

Bizarrely, I identified with these women when I first read these books in my thirties. I did not identify with Sasha’s life-style, of course – we women of the 20th century all had to work – but I understood the crying.

But reading is a funny thing: you can get so lost in a book that you forget yourself. You become the character, or the omniscient narrator, or whatever you’re reading for. And so over the years I’ve been a lot of unlikely characters: Dido (The Aeneid), Anna Karenina (Anna Karenina), Meg Eliot (The Middle Age of Mrs. Eliot), Dorothea Brooke (Middlemarch), and Lucy Snowe (Villette).

Rhys’s writing is exquisite, canny, and lucid. Despite Sasha’s intelligence, she drifts. She recklessly makes friends with a Russian artist and a gigolo, but has no interest in sex, and repeatedly says “No” to the gigolo. She is a bit uncertain about these men, but hangs out with anyone who shows up. If you’re like me you keep saying: “No, no, no, no, Sasha.” Eventually, unexpectedly, she pays a terrible price. And then I cried.

I think that we love these books (a) because the style is gorgeous, (b) because Rhys is a genius, and (c) because we have a sense of “But for the grace of God, there go I.”

Nowadays my favorite of Rhys’ books is Wide Sargasso Sea, a kind of prequel to Jane Eyre. She reimagines the story of Rochester’s mad wife, Bertha, who, in this verison, is not mad but Rochester’s victim.

I also recommend her unfinished autobiography, Smile Please. Fascinating, brilliant, and always disturbing, Rhys is one of my favorite writers of the twentieth century.