Voyage in the Dark (Norton Paperback Fiction) [Paperback]

Jean Rhys (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 17, 1994 | Series: Norton Paperback Fiction

Rhys's voice is starkly simple, yet sharp as nails.

Autobiographically inspired, Rhys created stories of the slightly adrift every woman looking for an anchor in a cold, hostile landscape. Her heroine in Voyage in the Dark is Anna Morgan, a young woman in her late teens, relocated to England from her beloved home in the West Indies. She works as a chorus girl, traveling the country to dank boarding rooms and shabby theaters. Fortune seems to grab her one day in the shape of a wealthy, older man who sets her up in London, calling for her as his needs dictate. Anna falls in love with him, and allows herself to rely on him totally. When he grows tired of her, she begins a long spiraling decline. This is poignant, tense writing by the woman whom A. Alvarez called "the best living English novelist."

Editorial Reviews

Review

[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 )

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. - Saturday Review of Literature )

About the Author

Jean Rhys is the author of Wide Sargasso Sea and other novels.

Product Details

• Paperback: 192 pages
• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company (April 17, 1994)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0393311465
• ISBN-13: 978-0393311464
• Product Dimensions: 8 x 5.4 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 6.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (9 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #111,919 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

15 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars moving, pitiless, beautiful, January 9, 2004

By A Customer

This review is from: Voyage in the Dark (Norton Paperback Fiction) (Paperback)

this is my favourite book of all time. i came across it accidentally in Croydon library when I was 20 years old, i loved it then, and i love it now, 20 years later. i read other works of hers (and I think she is an amazing writer) and her biography (by Carole Angier - also utterly brilliant and very highly recommended) - but Voyage in the Dark is still my favourite.

Why this is is hard to say. There is something about the prose style - concise, clear but dreamlike. The subject matter - a woman alone in the world written with a pitiless observation. The themes, loss of innocence, the struggle for survival, the loss of love - all beautifully written.

Carole Angier analyses all this far better than I ever could - if you love literature the chances are (man or woman) you will love this work. I do recommend it, and others works by Rhys, and her definitive biography by Carole Angiers.

6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Decadent, Dissolute, Desolate, September 4, 2008

By 

Giordano Bruno - See all my reviews
(HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)    (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)   

This review is from: Voyage in the Dark (Norton Paperback Fiction) (Paperback)

A stern warning to my teenage son: Stay clear of wistful waifs who exude sexy depression and masochistic neediness, especially if they seem to be talented with words; you won't like yourself in the novel they write about you.

Certainly Ford Madox Ford, a great unhappy writer on his own hook, would second that advice after reading the portrayal of his relationship with Jean Rhys in her second novel, Quartet. Rhys's first four novels - Voyage in the Dark, Quartet, After Leaving Mr. Mackensie, and Good Morning Midnight - are all essentially chapters in her self-excoriating semi-autobiography, the agonizing tale of her life-spiral into degradation and suicidal depression. As a pretty-but-not-beautiful young white girl from the Afro-Caribbean island of Dominica, our heroine takes one step toward shaping her life by de-exiling herself to England. From that step on, it's all adrift, from sexual exploitation (two-way) to exploitation, grimmer and grimier with each episode. She's a sad, sick kitty, this self-hating waif. She also writes with a poignant, painful realism that was way ahead of her time (the 1920s in London and Paris) in terms of confessional literature. There's something in almost every chapter of Rhy's fictionalized desolation that makes me want to run a few miles in the hills, take a cold shower, and listen to a Bach cantata to revitalize myself. There's also something so honest in her that I come back for more desperation on the page.

That's not what I expected when I bought the complete novels. I'd just spent two weeks in Dominica, hiking, snorkling, bird-watching on that beautiful volcanic cone of an island, where equal parts are blended of pitiful colonial detritus and indomitable Black joyousness. I'd never read a word of Rhys, but I noticed a shabby house with her name on a plaque in Roseau, the mildewed rubble-heap that passes for a port city. I expected something on the order of Jamaica Kincaid, or even better, the early hilarious novels of VS Naipaul. Ooo-wee, was I on the wrong track!

I seldom urge people to read depressing novels or down-hearted poems. The world has a way of supplying each of us as much despair as we need. Rhys is an exception. Her sorrow is so pure than it exonerates her degraded life. I haven't read her last novel yet - Wide Sargasso Sea, written 30 years later and considered her masterpiece - but I will. If ever a life required a redemption, it was Jean Rhys's.

7 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Discovered too late, March 8, 2006

By 

VanGo "This place is dead anyway" (London, UK) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Voyage in the Dark (Norton Paperback Fiction) (Paperback)

This is an enjoyable, if short, early novel by the once forgotten British writer, Jean Rhys, who’s celebrated, Wide Sargasso Sea, contains the same inspiration that of her upbringing in the Caribbean.

Essentially autobiographical, she tells the story of Anna Morgan, a 19 year old girl, recently arrived in London from Dominica (Rhys was born and raised on the small Caribbean island of Dominica). Evoking a penurious existence of cold London bed sits, surrounded by bleak fog and bad food. (Unsurprising as Dominica is famed for its lush habitat, “The Nature Island of the Caribbean”).

She relates the people that Anna encounters who invariably are sexually predatory men, selfish and jealous women and cold hearted relatives. But Anna is also a callow youth, cold towards everyone she meets and so I couldn’t relate to her, but mainly as she acted impulsively and without reason.

However, this novel was ahead of its time in describing the alienation of a newly arrived emigrant and also the situation and plight of women when sick or unemployed. In the absence of a social welfare system, Rhys portrays the women who relied on finding a man to look after them, and also the men who used them for their ends.

Apart form this I personally wouldn’t buy this book on its own despite it having some insights into the world of London and a woman’s place in it at a certain time period. I don’t think it’s a fully appreciated work unless read together with those of her other earlier novels, perhaps as part of a collected works series.