Voyage in the dark

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Voyage in the dark

The book jacket illustration depicts a woman standing alone in an elegant dining club with an unhappy expression on her face. Behind her are a number of patrons in evening dress seated at tables.

About this item

Title:: Voyage in the dark

Identifier:: PR9275.D653R59291967

Permalink:: https://n2t.net/ark:/81984/d37s18

Type:: Image

Notes:: Barbara Brown was the jacket designer. Reprint of the 1934 edition. Essentially her first novel, Rhys put this aside for a number of years (she was never clear how many) before she published her first work, a collection of short stories, The Left Bank, in 1927, on the grounds that it was too rawly autobiographical. Published some ten years later (1934) in much fictionalized form, its autobiographical nature is still discernible. Voyage in the Dark is the only one in the group of four novels in the decade between 1929 and 1938 whose lone female and socially marginal protagonist, Anna Morgan, is doubly vulnerable because she is, as she repeats at several points, "a West Indian", a white colonial "without a history". Her descent through aimless affairs, effectively a form of unacknowledged prostitution, leads to a nearly botched abortion. The ambiguity of the ending, where Anna thinks "of mornings...and of starting all over again" is patent. The novel is interesting critically especially since it went through an extensive re-writing process during the composition and publication of Quartet (1928) and After Leaving Mr. MacKenzie (1930). The protagonists of these two novels, although not colonial, are like Anna Morgan, socially marginal, isolated and vulnerable. 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.