One day Anna goes out and meets Laurie by chance, along with two American boyfriends of hers, Carl and Joe. They go out for drinks and get a little tipsy. Laurie and Anna meet up with Vincent to arrange the money for the abortion. He assures her that everything will be all right, but commands Anna to return the letters between her and Walter, which she does. To note briefly the style: it is excellent. High-modern perfection of form and thought. Anna is conveyed in deteriorating haze through memory, observation, jumping thoughts, violent impulses. But behind the subjective skree, Rhys' voice is exacting and precisely purposed. It was one of those days when you see the ghosts of all the other lovely days... From behind a glass." Anna is like a dress rehearsal for Antoinette in Wide Sargasso Sea: adrift in cold London with her troubled memories of her upbringing in the Caribbean, just eighteen when the book opens, and a victim of her own naivety and innocence. Languorous, emotionally exhausted, unable to tell the difference between coercion and a fantasised (is it?) love affair, she has been abandoned by her stepmother who appropriates her inheritance, floats into and out of a job as a touring chorus girl and slips into a hazy position where she is not quite a prostitute but where her lovers slip money covertly into her handbag. She doesn't even have the dignity of controlling the transaction.

They go out again to a hotel. It is implied that Laurie is a prostitute, and Anna goes into hysterics, and throws a scene. Anna is desperately afraid that Walter will get bored and leave her. One day he takes her to the country for what is at first a wonderful time. The trip is cut short, however, when Vincent and his French lover, who have joined them, fall out and decide to leave early. Walter tells Anna that the reason for the argument was because Walter is taking Vincent when he goes to the US for a while … the first time that Anna has heard of the trip. Nesse contexto de mudança Jean Rhys descreve magistralmente as diferenças entre um espaço territorial e outro, entre as suas cores, os seus odores e as suas texturas.

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As if to tease her talent as a writer, Rhys pens a few passages of atmospheric prose, but these lovely interludes are few and far between. Autobiographical novels – they should all of them be loaded onto one of those huge barges that take garbagey rubbish out into the ocean and set on fire and the charred remains dumped somewhere ecologically safe, anywhere, so long as I don’t have to look at them anymore. Ugh – how ultimately tiresomely obvious and 100% unimaginative and egomaniac is this author that all they can do is write this thing about themselves having rites of passage and being young and confused or whatever in Ohio or Minsk or Adelaide and having bad sex or wanting to have bad sex. Come on, you creative types, what are we paying you for? Make something up! It’s bound to be more interesting that your dreary upbringings which you may have thought so uniquely unique until you read all the other autobiographical novels and found that wasn’t so.

Alas. A splendid opportunity to set the record straight seems to slip through Rhys’s fingers like so much gossamer colour, and we end up with Anna: Rhys’s 20 c courtesan risen from...(later on this)....to extol the virtues of stupidity and frivolity of the demi-monde. Early on, Anna seems to have a very negative impression of (all) men: one eyed her up "in that way they have" and "he didn't look at my breasts or my legs as they usually do", but the story progresses, her thoughts on men are replaced by introspection and memories of home. When she is a kept woman, she muses "I am hopeless, resigned, utterly happy. Is that me? I am bad, not good any longer, bad". Surely not another unhappy in love female protagonist who's nights end in turmoil? Yep. I shouldn't be surprised really. Novel number three for Rhys and it's more of the same. Anna Morgan is a long way from home, transitioning from her childhood in the West Indies into her miserable life in London. She is a chorus girl to start with, on tour with a theatrical company, she also likes a drink or two, and spending time lounging about alone feeling sorry for herself. Men would enter her life though, and they have money, she loves the affection and indulgences they provide, and she actually feels something that has been missing for what seems like an eternity: happiness. But parts of her can't resist falling into depression and the solace of drinking to numb the pain that goes goes with it. In a great deal of the book Anna reflects nostalgically about her island home. “I’m a real West Indian……” (Pg.47) Poor Anna. She was just a kid! Orphaned, left to the care of relatives who were more concerned with what she cost them than with giving her a chance at a decent life. So she became a chorus girl and she sought the company of wealthy men, daddy substitutes I suspect. (Oh yes Jean, I know all about your daddy issues.) Who can fault her for how things ended up? Drunk, penniless and alone, you’ll get no judgments from me Jean. What’s a girl to do? Girls gotta eat, right? Girl needs a roof over her head. So she takes a little money from men who have more than enough of it to go ‘round, who wouldn’t?

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While a first love can be a period of intensely effervescent emotion and passion, the decline and death of the ill-fated romance is often a harrowing and hellish plunge into the darkness of pain and sorrow. Jean Rhys impeccable Voyage in the Dark chronicles such a descent, or tragic voyage, through the rise and fall of Anna Morgan’s love affair with a wealthy Englishman. Anna, coming from the West Indies and working as a chorus girl across England—much like Rhys herself, whose own experiences illuminate this emotionally charged novel—has her beautiful and youthful innocents trampled upon by the misogynistic society of men who willfully takes advantage of her to fulfill their carnal lusts. She must stay strong and keep her head above water by accepting the money her late-night lovers pass her way, as the often-married men mistake financial support as a morally acceptable compensation for the responsibility they have no intentions of shouldering. Through her elegantly executed juxtaposition of England and the West Indies, as well as gender relations, Rhys creates a cutting compounded metaphor of English imperialism and misogyny that exposes the hardships a poor, young woman must face in a society that views them as nothing but material goods to be plundered and discarded while they struggle to etch out their own identity.

Anna has every opportunity to actually hold down a job, if she can be bothered to rise from her bed, in which she spends all of her day. Show girl, manicurist, etc: there are jobs she can throw herself into, but chooses not to. Willfully. Now, I’m not saying being a manicurist is the epitomy of career success, but if banging for a bob is so darn distasteful, then it might just be an option. Anna is very free-thinking for the time: non-religious ("I believe there's something horrible about any sort of praying"!), amoral and independent, albeit more through necessity than choice. Had the book been published in the nineteen-tens (rather than 1934), it might have been very controversial. As it is, its modernity means it's still pertinent today. Anna receives a letter from Vincent saying that Walter is sorry, but he is no longer in love with her. They both still want to assist her as much as possible.Anna sells some clothing to raise money to pay her rent. In her new accommodations, she meets a woman called Ethel who is only there, she tells Anna, while her new place is being refurnished. They go to the pictures together, and Ethel, who runs a manicure and massage business, offers Anna accommodation and a job. It was one of those days when you can see the ghosts of all the other lovely days. You drink a bit and watch the ghosts of all the lovely days that have ever been from behind a glass. Everything is green, everything things are growing. There is never one moment of stillness – always something buzzing. And then dark cliffs and ravines and the smell of rotten leaves and damp. In addition to charting the moral descent of a young woman, this book is also a study in post-colonial idenitity politics and subsequently contains some racially insensitive language.