Rhys, Jean (Vol. 124) - Arnold E. Davidson (essay date Summer 1984)
Arnold E. Davidson (essay date Summer 1984)
SOURCE: "The Art and Economics of Destitution in Jean Rhys's After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie," in Studies in the Novel, Vol. XVI, No. 2, Summer, 1984, pp. 215-27.
[In the following essay, Davidson offers analysis of the characters, narrative structure, and thematic concerns of After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie.]
Jean Rhys published her first four novels to little notice in the 1920s and 1930s and then passed into a long oblivion but one that she survived to see herself proclaimed in 1974 as "quite simply, the best living English novelist." However, as Elizabeth Abel subsequently observed, a belated recognition of Rhys's genius as a writer does not itself do full justice to that genius, and, "despite her exceptional technical skill and the relevance of her subject matter to the women's movement," her fiction "has [still] received little critical attention." Moreover, Rhys is commonly viewed, in Todd...
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