So good, but not pleasant. There's a particular anxiety that I feel for trapped women, and I just had to keep reading until I knew it was over one way or the other. ( )

A young english woman from the West Indians is cast adrift by the death of her father and the indifference of her stepmother. She is in a theater touring company in England, but she despises the poverty of her life and she can never get warm. Taking up with married men and being "kept" by them slowly transforms her life for the worse. ( )

This was a very bleak story. ( )

After her father’s death, a young woman, Anna Morgan, is brought from the Caribbean island of Dominica to Edwardian England by her stepmother. Hester’s plan is to provide the girl with enough of an education to allow her to be gainfully employed or married. In the end, the financial responsibility is too much for the widow, and the young woman, already showing signs of straying from respectability, is cut loose. By the time she’s 19, Anna’s touring English cities with a musical comedy troupe.

In Southsea, she meets Walter Jeffries, a stockbroker twice her age, and ends up becoming his mistress. She appears to have no will of her own, doing almost all anyone suggests—unless she detects the hint of a sneer from him or anyone else. At those moments, she erupts: breaks things, shouts, or puts lit cigarette tips to the skin of the offender. Her extreme dependence (which she chooses to believe is “love”) and her West-Indian origins are no longer a charm but a liability. Walter ends his relationship with Anna. She drifts from one experience to another, sometimes the early twentieth-century equivalent of a modern-day paid escort and other times little more than a streetwalker. She drinks increasingly heavily. Finally or fatefully, the inevitable occurs. She finds she is pregnant. When a variety of abortifacient tablets don’t work, Anna has to rely on an old musical-theatre friend’s connections to a back-street abortionist, the bill for which is footed by Walter—though the child is not his.

Rhys’s style is certainly “interesting”—for lack of a better word. Told in the first-person from Anna’s POV, the novel’s prose is loose, vague, discursive—often a kind of dreamlike stream of consciousness. There are regular flashbacks to the protagonist’s childhood and youth in Dominica: the heat, the ocean, the lush wild vegetation, and the rich culture of the island—all of which contrast with the chilly, grey uniformity of England. Anna, who balks at artifice, snobbery, and English respectability, has always wished she had been born black. She feels greater affinity for the descendants of slaves and the indigenous Caribs than for whites.

This is the first of Rhys’s novels I’ve read. Even though I knew of the author’s alcoholism, nothing quite prepared me for the abject and pathological passivity of Anna, Rhys’s protagonist and alter ego. I am not sure I fully understand the appeal of Rhys’s writing. I find it almost amusing to think of feminists latching on to this author as a model of, well, anything. Is it her daring in writing about the shadowy side of the female psyche unfolding in seedy settings? A few lines from the Eurythmic’s famous song repeatedly came to mind as I read:

Some of them want to use you
Some of them want to get used by you
Some of them want to abuse you
Some of them want to be abused

I’ve not yet read Rhys’s “masterpiece”—The Wide Sargasso Sea. We’ll have to see how that goes . . . ( )

Short and not so sweet novel of Anna trying to survive in London after leaving her childhood home in Dominica. London is grey and cold and life is not very kind to her, it's a pretty bleak book. The writing is very stripped back and effective. ( )