Voyage in the Dark

Voyage in the Dark
London : A. Deutsch, 1967
188 p. ; 21 cm.

According to Rhys’s own account in her autobiographical work, Smile Please, (see note below), the earliest version of this novel was written years before her first published work, a collection of short stories, The Left Bank, in 1927, but was not re-written and published until the mid-thirties after Quartet (1928) and Leaving Mr. Mackenzie (1930). The protagonist, Anna Morgan, is the only one in the group of four novels in the decade between 1929 and 1938 who is a colonial from the Caribbean and whose colonial status, which earns her the contempt of other characters, contributes to her vulnerability as a young woman without resources adrift in London. Although Rhys would not return to the issue of the colonial until her novel of 30 years later, Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), some of the recognizably autobiographical elements of her fiction are already apparent in Voyage in the Dark: the dubious independence of urban life for women without money or connections, vulnerable to sexual predators and the oblivion of alcohol. A first person narrative, the novel spirals downward toward its inevitable ending in abortion and abandonment.

H.D. Carberry Collection of Caribbean Studies
University of Illinois at Chicago Library
Daley Library - Special Collections/3rd floor (non-circ.)
PR9275.D653 R5929 1967

More images from the H.D. Carberry Collection.

To search for this book at other libraries, use WorldCat.