My review of After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie, by Jean Rhys

After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie

by Jean Rhys

My rating: 5 out of 5 stars

This is the delectable Jean Rhys at her very best. She has our central character deliciously sussed out. We know her shortcomings and want to help her out - it's a tough life out there for Julia Martin. Hell, it's a goddam jungle.

Some of this underdog protagonist's wry observations are as bluntly incisive as Rhys's narrative observation of her:

'Of course she had some pathetic illusions about herself or she would not be able to go on living.'

'It's so easy to make a person who hasn't got anything seem wrong.'

'If all good, respectable people had one face, I'd spit in it.' 

And so on.

Released in 1931, three years after Quartet, this was Rhys's second published novel, which she wrote and had published when she was 41. One reviewer called this material from her early period 'sordid'. It would be another 36 years before the starchy literary establishment acknowledged her with the 1967 WH Smith Literary Award, of which she said only, in that characteristic understated way she had with irony and words: 'It has come too late.'

I laugh out loud and cry a little whenever I read Mackenzie, just as I so often do when reading any of this formidable author's work.

This novel should, like all her others of this period, have been far more successful than it was in its day, just as its Jean Rhys should have been given far greater recognition, far sooner, for her extraordinary talent. She was a proud pariah though and swallowed down her lot, along with a rather lot of gin and who could blame her?

It would be criminal for any serious reader or writer to let this, or any other Jean Rhys novel escape their attention. Treat yourself to this fabulously rocky, rollercoaster ride down the gurgler in silk stockings - you deserve it.

Then read it again and see what you missed.