Jean Rhys, Voyage in the Dark

Peter Hulme (University of Essex)

The Literary Encyclopedia. Volume 4.1.1: Anglophone Writing and Culture of Central America and the Caribbean.
Vol. editors: Ronald Cummings (McMaster University), Delphine Munos (Université de Liège), Melanie Otto (Trinity College Dublin), Jak Peake (University of Essex), Abigail Ward (University of Nottingham)

Dates

First circulation or publication 1934

Places

Dominica (Country of Origin)

Genres and Modes

Novel

Resources

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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was Jean Rhys's third published novel, although it draws on her very earliest writing (which had also been used in the unpublished novel,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 and memories associated with her Caribbean childhood. Anna's recollection of her

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879 words

Citation: Hulme, Peter. "Voyage in the Dark". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 19 January 2001 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=8661, accessed 16 April 2024.]

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