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Jean Rhys: Voyage in the Dark (1934)

By Peter Hulme (University of Essex)

Indexing Data:

  • Domain: Literature.
  • Genre: Novel.
  • Country: England, Britain, Europe; Dominica, Caribbean.

Life, Works and Times

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Voyage in the Dark (1934) was Jean Rhys's third published novel, although it draws on her very earliest writing (which had also been used in the unpublished novel, Triple Sec); is set back in 1914 – unlike her previous two novels, which had had more or less contemporaneous settings; and is told in four parts in the voice of Anna Morgan, a white West Indian chorus girl, still a teenager, the youngest of Rhys's protagonists. Rhys had originally intended calling the novel “Two Tunes.”

Anna Morgan has a stronger sense of a personal history than Rhys's other protagonists from her early novels (all those before Wide Sargasso Sea), and that personal history is identified with the colours and smells

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Published 19 January 2001

Citation: Hulme, Peter. "Voyage in the Dark". The Literary Encyclopedia. 19 January 2001.
[http://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=8661, accessed 9 February 2010.]