RHYS, Jean.

£1,750 · Offered by Peter Harrington · No longer available

After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie. First edition, first impression, a handsomely bound copy of the author's second novel, a "perfectly told tragedy of a young woman who was equally lost in the narrow world of Paris and the wide world of London. More, much more, will be heard of this unsentimental and assured young author" (Daily Herald, 12 Feb. 1931, p. 6).This title was published before Rhys slipped into obscurity and poverty. In 1949 the actress Selma Vaz Dias placed an advertisement in the papers enquiring for Rhys's whereabouts and seeking her permission to adapt another of her novels, Good Morning, Midnight (1939), into a BBC programme. This contact, and further efforts by Vaz Dias and others in the publishing field, led to Rhys's re-emergence into the literary community, the republication of her books, which had fallen out of print, and the eventual publication of her masterpiece, Wide Sargasso Sea (1966)."Like other modernist writers, Jean Rhys transformed autobiography into art. Her first four novels have contemporary metropolitan settings, London or Paris, sometimes both; they all centre on a heroine, drifting, unsettled, and displaced, living in rented rooms or cheap hotels, economically dependent on men, aware that her sexuality may be her only means of survival" (ODNB).

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