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 Bender's wording, as "the author of one masterpiece [and] four less interesting novels." Wide Sargasso Sea, the acknowledged masterpiece and Rhys's fifth and final novel, has, of course, received the preponderance of critical attention. Bender observes, too, that a general critical concern with Rhys's "topicality … carries its own dangers," one of which is a tendency to overlook how "seriously [she was] engaged in the modernist movement in literature."

The present essay is intended to address some of the imbalances suggested in the previous paragraph. Rhys's fiction does merit continued critical attention, and it particularly merits such attention because, as Bender implies, the artistic principles and procedures of this author have not yet been adequately assessed. Abel, in fact, practices an odd version of the critical neglect she early deplores. She first maintains that "although Rhys describes her heroines' progressive degeneration, often in excruciating detail, she fails to provide an adequate explanation for this process," and then argues that "a closer look at Rhys's recurrent heroine" gives us an explanation in the form of the protagonist's "schizophrenia." But Abel's delineation of the incipient madness in the characters misses the covert method in the plots—a method that also "rationalizes" most of the evidence of irrationality upon which Abel's argument rests. In short, the "closer look" must be at the individual novels themselves and more specifically at just how carefully Rhys depicts in her "sparse and repetitive narratives" (Abel's phrase) a particular protagonist's declining fortunes and to what ends. I therefore propose to examine one test case, and for my present purposes I pick not the first novel, Quartet, which does admittedly evince a number of the flaws that first novels are commonly heir to, but the second, After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie. In this work we can see how quickly Rhys achieved a characteristic artistic control of her essential subject matter. We can also see how capably she exercised that control and how much her second novel is not at all what a recent critic has called it, a "book [which] does not give its heroine's desolation the quality of art."

Like Rhys's other longer fictions, After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie is the story of a woman more left than leaving. The novel begins, it will be remembered, in Paris in the springtime. But in that hallowed romantic setting, the protagonist, Julia Martin, a "jeune dame" of thirty-six, enjoys no April rejuvenation. Julia's fall, Rhys demonstrates through an unobtrusive chronology carefully worked into the novel, continues into spring and beyond. Left early in October by Mr. Mackenzie, her latest lover, Julia has lived for six months on the weekly allowance that he has continued to provide. Her first crisis is a substantially larger check (fifteen hundred francs instead of the usual three hundred) and the promise that there will be no more. Julia seeks out Mackenzie in his favorite restaurant, slaps him, and flings back at him his money. While doing so, she is observed by Mr. Horsfield, an Englishman vacationing in Paris, who soon becomes Mackenzie's successor and who almost immediately provides Julia with the same sum that she has just thrown away. That money returned enables her to journey to London to see her family (a dying mother, a jealous sister, a selfish uncle), to seek financial help from the wealthy older man who was her first lover (he had promised that they would always be friends), and to continue her affair with Mr. Horsfield. All three objectives come to nothing. Ten days after her voyage to England Julia returns to Paris; ten days after her return to Paris she once more encounters Mr. Mackenzie, who buys her a drink, sadly observes how "suddenly" she has gone "phut," and obliges her when she requests a "loan" of one hundred francs. On that declining note the novel ends.

The argument of the plot thus summarized is not promising, and yet Rhys everywhere gives her story unexpected depth and complexity. We might note, for example, how After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie opens with a half-reversal of the usual fate of the usual demimondaine protagonist. Instead of ending with this foreordained victim seduced and abandoned, we commence that way. Or more accurately, we half commence that way. Julia Martin was not exactly seduced in that she readily acceded to Mackenzie's original advances. She is not exactly abandoned in that, six months after he decided to take himself out of her life, he is still paying her three hundred francs a week, which is enough for her to go on living modestly in Paris. But not exactly living either. For the six months following Mackenzie's departure, Julia has immured herself in a room in a cheap hotel seeking mostly "a good sort of place to hide in … until the sore and cringing feeling, which was the legacy of Mr. Mackenzie, had departed." Her refuge is also the setting for a sustained but hopeless rage. Often she would "walk up and down the room consumed with hatred of the world and everybody in it…. Often she would talk to herself as she walked." As Thomas Staley has observed, references to ghosts run throughout the novel. The first ghost is Julia herself haunting her quarters and her own empty existence.

There is a definite point to the protraction of that haunting, which is to say that Rhys has her reasons for beginning the book with the aftermath of a crucial parting and not with the preliminary relationship or even the parting itself. In the first place, the separation is standard, predictable, part of the normal course of affairs. Why note what has often happened before? What has not happened before is Julia's sense of being "done for" after being put down yet another time. The reader might therefore wonder at first what was so special about Mr. Mackenzie (we never learn his first name) that his loss mattered so much. The answer, the novel soon shows, is nothing; Mackenzie is no different from his numerous predecessors; he treats Julia no differently than they all have done. But that "no difference" finally makes a difference, and Julia breaks after being dropped once more in just the same fashion as she has been dropped numerous times before. The retreat from life, the emotional debilitation, the futile rage that Julia sees as "the legacy of Mr. Mackenzie" is also the legacy of all who have preceded him. One unlikely reaction sums up the previous course of a too common life.

Rhys also uses her protagonist's initial contradictory reaction—such a minor cause, such a major effect—to suggest something of the contradictions inherent in that protagonist's previous life. Julia, we are one time told, had gone from "artist's model" to "mannequin" to "principally living on the money given to her by various men." That third mode of supporting herself on the basis of her good looks occasions a delicate question as to this character's actual profession just before the beginning of the novel. Is she a woman selling herself to a limited clientele and for no set price, or is she a woman too ready to fall in love with some man from whom she can then accept assistance because financial gifts are tokens of his love for her? Is she essentially a mercenary or essentially a romantic? The answer, of course, is that she must be both and neither. Physical survival demands the former and precludes the latter. Psychic survival demands the latter and precludes the former. Furthermore, these fine considerations would not apply if the woman were simply a prostitute. Cash received for no services rendered would then pose no problem. But Julia's problem, at the beginning of the novel, is that she must insist that her dealings with Mackenzie were not primarily commercial despite the fact that she is still being paid. Such sustained pretense, incidentally, is also required for the greater satisfaction of her customers. The men in Julia's life are as determined as she to define their dealings with her as affairs of the heart, not affairs of the pocketbook.

We might also note that Julia originally thought that "a week or perhaps a fortnight" would suffice as a post-letdown recovery period. Six months later she is no nearer a cure. That contradictory conjunction of an optimistic prognosis and a prolonged devastation reflects Julia's basic strategy of surviving crises through the odd ploy of both denying and indulging them. Indeed, Rhys suggests her protagonist's capabilities as a victim-endurer even with the first sentences in the novel: "After she had parted from Mr. Mackenzie, Julia Martin went to live in a cheap hotel on the Quai des Grands Augustins. It looked a lowdown sort of place and the staircase smelt of the landlady's cats, but the rooms were cleaner than you would have expected." The cheapness of the hotel is countered by the grand address; the rooms, cleaner than you would have expected, are not necessarily as clean as you might have wished, and the stairway smells of cat. So is the hotel acceptable, bearable, or not? The question is hard to answer, and that surely is the point. What I am arguing is that Rhys, in portraying her protagonist and her protagonist's situation, strikes from the very start a strained balance correlative to the way Julia balances herself on the edge of her profession. We have the facts of Julia's physical and psychological destitution and countering those facts we have the ploys whereby Julia attempts to retain some semblance of self-respect. Note, in this context, the very first words of the novel and how the deliberately indefinite formulation, "After she had parted from …" serves to suggest, as does the title itself, that Julia has left Mr. Mackenzie without exactly denying that he has thrown her out.

Julia's careful balancing allows her to live on the limited resources available to her. Yet that same balancing, we soon see, sometimes costs more than this character can afford. There is, therefore, a double irony to the author's double entry bookkeeping of her character's psychological and social losses and gains. Even the first entries, the claims Julia makes for herself—the hotel is not so bad, she has not yet become the "hideous" old woman upstairs—attest by their very paltriness to her desperate plight. But that plight becomes even more desperate when yet another transaction must be doubly entered. Julia receives Mackenzie's unexpectedly large last check. That same night she seeks him out and makes a scene. She does not need his money, she must insist, precisely because it is all she will receive and she needs it more than ever.

There are still other contradictions in this charged encounter. The scene with Mackenzie will punish him for abandoning her, first as his lover and then as his officially abandoned lover. But punishing him, she also, with clear Freudian implications, punishes herself, first for allowing herself to be bought when she entered into the relationship and second for allowing herself to be paid off when he exited from it. With such gestures as returning Mackenzie's money or returning herself to London and to the family and former lover who all want her elsewhere, Julia enforces a subconscious sentence against herself. In short, Rhys shows that even as her protagonist acts to deny a crisis ("I am an honorable woman and I won't take your [Mackenzie's] money"), she also acts to make it worse ("I am a destitute woman and must accept whatever money you [Horsfield] will give me and on whatever terms you give it"). In the duplicity of that double action Julia both penalizes herself for how low she has fallen and demonstrates the justice of her punishment.

Consciously, of course, Julia would vociferously deny the verdict that she, in effect, passes. She is, she would have it, mostly the victim of circumstances, circumstances being mostly a shortage of cash. "You see," she had one time argued with Mackenzie, "a time comes in your life when, if you have any money, you can go one way. But if you have nothing at all—absolutely nothing at all—and nowhere to get anything, then you go another." She thereby asserts that she is not responsible for the expedients she has been forced to embrace. Yet that rationalization, Rhys shows, takes Julia farther down the road she would have supposedly preferred not to take and serves substantially to make her into the woman whom she claims only circumstances forced her to become.

Rhys early incorporates into the novel a calculated reference to a still larger dichotomy implicit in her protagonist's story. When Julia encounters Mackenzie at the restaurant she gives vent to her hitherto repressed anger: "It was like a flood which has been long dammed up suddenly pouring forth." Yet he is not at all moved by the torrent of her grief and rage: "He listened, half-smiling. Surely even she must see that she was trying to make a tragedy out of a situation that was fundamentally comical. The discarded mistress…. A situation consecrated as comical by ten thousand farces and a thousand comedies." He would make a farce of her tragedy, and furthermore the whole weight of cultural tradition supports him, not her. After all, how can all those farces and comedies be wrong? Rhys's task, of course, is to show that they are wrong, that we have all been conditioned to evaluate romances gone astray in ways favorable to the men thereby discomforted. This author would have us read Julia's story to correct the conventional misreading of that story. The protagonist's suffering demands attention, not the "Mackenzieish" dismissal of "well, what did she expect if she chose to live that way?"

Rhys gives substance to a story of suffering by giving it form. What might otherwise be merely the ongoing saga of Julia's setbacks—a kind of soggy revelling in protracted sorrows—is subtly cast into a three-part tale that circles back, appropriately, to its own approximate origins. That three-part progression is, it should also be noted, underlined by the geographic progress of the plot. The first four chapters constitute Part One and, beginning with Julia abandoned in Paris by Mr. Mackenzie, tell of her crucial encounter with him, her subsequent meeting with Mr. Horsfield who gives her the same amount of money that she insisted on returning to Mackenzie, and of her decision (made possible by the recouping of that loss) to return to London. Part Two, the bulk of the novel, chronicles in fourteen chapters her misadventures in London. We see her disappointed by her family, by her elderly first lover (she has believed his long ago parting admonition that if she should ever need …), and finally by Horsfield himself. In Part Three, only three chapters long and hence the briefest section of the book, she is back in Paris again and in retreat in another cheap hotel very much like the one in which she was originally in hiding.

Yet the concluding three chapters do not quite balance the opening four. Julia's world, small as it was, has contracted still more, and her options are even more limited than they originally were. To return again to London, for example, is, at the end, quite out of her reach. The form traced out during the course of the novel is not, then, a circle—a line of narrative bent round to return to its own origin as does, say, James Joyce's Finnegans Wake. Instead, Rhys's narration bends back to its beginning but falls short of it, which gives us, to translate the novel into spatial terms, a geometric figure that corresponds to one full turn of a spiral. The ending of the circled novel is totally open; the action portrayed in the plot can be imaginatively extended in endless repetition. The spiralled novel is both open and closed. The plot imaginatively extended can be represented as a single line of action often repeated but still circling toward its own vanishing point. The resultant figure of a vortex descending to nothingness is also clearly suggested in the novel itself. At one point Julia stands looking long "at a picture representing a male figure encircled by what appeared to be a huge mauve corkscrew. At the end of the picture was written, 'La vie est un spiral, flottant dans l'espace, que les hommes grimpent et redescendent très, très, très serieusement.'"

Form substantiates the story, and details substantiate the form. For example, Rhys provides a number of seemingly minor facts to conjoin the first part with the third one while also differentiating them one from the other. Thus the gift of fifteen hundred francs that brought Mr. Horsfield into Julia's life is not exactly matched by the later gift of ten pounds that apparently takes him out of her life. Or Mr. Mackenzie's final large sum which she returns to him in the first section is partly returned to her as his small "loan" of one hundred francs in the third section. And to consider all of her men and their money, we can note that Julia boasts to Mr. Horsfield, in Part One, about her London friend, "a very rich man," and how readily "he'd help me." The friend is Mr. James; the help is all of twenty pounds, which serves only to take Julia back to Paris and Part Three.

Two noteworthy chapters, "The First Unknown" in Part One and "The Second Unknown" in Part Three, provide another example of Rhys's unequal balancing to achieve connective contrasts between the novel's beginning and its end. In each case Julia is approached by a man who intends a pick-up in the streets. She denounces the first stranger for his presumptuous insult of, in effect, labelling her a prostitute. He denies the charge: "Not at all…. I have some money and I am willing to give it to you. Why do you say that I am ignoble." For him, obviously, ignobility and insult lie in proposing to enjoy the favors of an unknown lady without at least offering to pay. Yet Julia is still buoyed up by this encounter, and back in her room "her forebodings about the future were changed into a feeling of exultation." She can think, as "she looked at herself in the glass … 'After all, I'm not finished. It's all nonsense that I am. I'm not finished at all.'" It is the second stranger who finishes her when he sees her more clearly during the course of the second pass: "'Oh, la la.' he said. 'Ah, non, alors,' [and] he turned about and walked away." His look of "deadly and impartial criticism" strikes her like "a blow over the heart." The blow is her recognition of her value in his eyes, even though she had no intention of bargaining with this prospective buyer either. Nevertheless, a non-transaction still leaves her both sold out and worthless at the end of the novel. The further irony is that it is unknown men, not the known men in her life, who most determine what her value must be.

As earlier noted, Rhys does not validate what would be the conventional reading of her protagonist's story. But neither does she validate her protagonist's own reading of her own story. Just as the unequal balance between the first part and the third gives us the form of the novel, the two chapters, "The First Unknown" and "The Second Unknown," are the fulcrum upon which that balance turns. It is through these two unknowns that we best know Julia, for it is her failures to read these readings (and the men who provide them—as unknown to her as she is to them) that show her reading of herself. Essentially, she is, throughout most of the novel, a blank page upon which others can inscribe whatever value they wish and that then is her value. So the two episodes in which Julia is differently priced by two nameless men appropriately frame most of the action in the novel even as they also emphasize what we might term the protagonist's "commodityness" and provide a paradigm for her dealings with all other characters. Rhys's point is clear. Having no money of her own, Julia is worth just what some man (even a total stranger) will pay to have or not to have—it does not matter which—her company. Valuing herself in this fashion, as she does until the very end of the novel, Julia seems no more disposed to take control of her own life or even to determine the direction of her fall than is a leaf in the wind.

Yet Rhys also shows that the obvious fecklessness of Julia's life is not the whole story, and that this character's resolute refusal to admit to motives does not prove that she hasn't any. "I don't know why I came. A sort of impulse, I suppose," is how Julia at one point "explains" her return to London. Admittedly, her decision to make the journey was consciously made on less than rational grounds:

She thought: 'If a taxi hoots before I count three, I'll go to London. If not, I won't.'

She counted, 'One … Two …' slowly. A car shrieked a loud blast. (ellipsis in the original)

Yet we still note the fudging here—the slow count, the fact that a "car" is not necessarily a "taxi"—and note also how fortuitously chance pushes Julia in the direction she will not admit she wishes to travel. She had already decided that she "must go away," that some escape from the mess she has made of things in Paris was "the only thing to be done." The money recently acquired from Horsfield makes that escape possible. Even better, it means that she can go home in some semblance of style, not as an obviously abject and defeated woman. Still more important, Julia wants to meet again with both her mother and her first lover as a kind of symbolic coming to terms with her own beginnings as both a woman and a certain kind of woman. And that large purpose serves a still larger one. A disastrous present prompts a return to the past which might provide the basis for a different future. In short, Julia is making a desperate attempt at some kind of rebirth.

It does not work; the journey to London comes to nothing; the return to Paris marks the three-part structure of the book and establishes the pattern of Julia's life. Implicit in that pattern is one of Rhys's subtlest ironies, for it is the protagonist's covert effort to alter the course of her existence that most attests to the downward spiral characteristic of her previous life. That life had been, of course, a round of men. Each man had represented a possible new beginning, a chance that this time it might be different, although it never was. In short, things after leaving Mr. Mackenzie continue to be much as they were before meeting him, and the specific setbacks Julia suffers in her attempt to escape, even briefly and geographically, the failure she has made of her life are themselves, as a brief analysis can show, versions of that failure.

To consider her first London failure, from the very beginning Julia's efforts to reestablish a relationship with her family are muddled. In need of validation, she also needs the badges of an assumed success. And again Rhys shows how her protagonist's desperate remedies only compound the problems they were intended to cover over. Because the older sister has spent most of her money on clothes, she must plead poverty to Norah when they first meet in the cheap, dingy hotel room that Julia can barely afford. Resentful of the sister who has not sacrificed herself for their dying mother ("And who's better dressed—you or I?"), Norah refuses Julia's implicit and explicit requests. She will not lend her any money; she will not even allow her sister to stay a few days in the family flat. Norah already has "a friend … a trained nurse" living with her to help with the mother, "and there's not a scrap more room in the place." Julia thus becomes an occasional bystander to her mother's dying; her limited role is directed not just by Norah but also by Norah's mannish friend, Miss Wyatt; the end result is a bitter quarrel with Norah immediately after the mother's death. That quarrel ends with one of the protagonist's saddest setbacks, Julia "being put out of her mother's house by a stranger." Which gives us one of Rhys's grimmer "home truths": Home, when you have to go there, is not always the place where they have to take you in.

Julia is dispossessed even during those times she can spend with her dying mother. The daughter never consciously acknowledges to herself what she wants (a ploy that obviously serves to blunt her disappointment when, as she suspects will be the case, her want is thwarted), but it is clear that she hopes for some sign of concern, acceptance, love. When the unconscious mother is beyond making such a sign, the most the daughter can do is to recollect a past that does not provide a base for some brave new beginning in her unhappy present. Julia's earliest memories of how as "a very young child she had loved her mother" who had then been "the warm center of the world" are inextricably mixed with memories of how she had been pushed at age six from the center of this world by the birth of her baby sister. Another female took her place in a crucial pairing (the story of Julia's life); that first pairing inverted still persists, with Norah now babying their dying mother in a manner that leaves no place for Julia. Witness, for example, the end of the first meeting with the mother: "Sometimes anybody strange seems to upset her. Go on; you'd better go," Norah orders, and "Julia went out of the room listening to Norah's crooning and authoritative voice. 'Don't cry, my darling. Don't cry, my sweet. Now, what is it? What is it you want?'"

Paralleling Julia's return to her young childhood past is her return to her young womanhood past, which is also an attempt to come to terms with another crucial abandonment. After the long afternoon spent with her unconscious mother, Julia pays an evening call on W. Neil James, the man with whom she had, at age nineteen, her first affair. Here too, Rhys hints, her protagonist has certain covert expectations. Again, Julia wants a sign. And this time she receives it, but the sign received is not exactly the sign she wanted. Indeed, the scene between these two former loves covertly at cross-purposes shows us Rhys at her tragicomic best. Mr. James treats Julia as an old friend even though he is thinking how "tactless" are such "resurrections of the past." She is uncomfortable in his presence, as if he were an "important person" to whom she was appealing and not an old friend. His polite request as to how she is doing elicits the honest answer that such a question is not intended to provoke. She would briefly describe the downward tenor of her life after she and he parted, in the hope that such a confession might be a possible preliminary to some from of absolution. He does not want to hear, for the saga of her setbacks can hardly gratify his vanity, considering his role in the tale. She wishes for some evidence of real concern but, with her characteristic inability to articulate to others or herself just what she wants, can only hint of money. Or perhaps the confusion lies elsewhere. After all, money is, in Julia's world, the best proof of concern. In any event, he is angered by her not so covert plea but also relieved. The promise of money can shut her up, and he promises. So she does receive a sign that he cares and what he mostly cares for, in the present as in the past, is to preserve his own equanimity. The sense of self-complacency that his twenty pounds purchases is cheap at the price. That twenty pounds defines her too—in the present as in the past. The gift received is, as were, undoubtedly, "gifts" before it, a payment for services rendered—not for sex this time but for a kind of masturbatory stroking of his ego. Just as it was with the mother, so is it with the lover. Julia's attempt to find in a problematic past a retreat from an impossible present gives her a parodic version of both her present and her past that is more demeaning than either was in its original form.

A spiral, however, spins both ways, and if the picture of the corkscrewed man sets forth a transsexualized synecdoche of the novel, it should also be remembered that the sentence appended to that painting observed that men clamber up as well as slide down life as a spiral. In different terms and in keeping with the double entry "bookkeeping" whereby Julia conducts her life and Rhys portrays it, we can observe that just as Julia's small triumphs often come at large cost, so too can her major setbacks bring her unexpected dividends. In this context, let us look again at Julia's London failures, starting with her inability to establish any connection with her family and with the breach between the two sisters.

When the two women first meet after a ten year separation, each reads in the other the other's story of the intervening years. Norah notes that Julia "doesn't even look like a lady now." But Norah too "was labelled for all to see." "Trained to certain opinions which forbid her even the relief of rebellion against her lot," Norah is exactly what Julia is not, the quintessential "good girl" who will act just as she is supposed to act. The novel dramatizes the differences between the two women, and it also dramatizes how little difference that difference makes. If Norah, then, represents, for Julia, the accepted and expected road, the road Julia has not taken, what Julia and the reader both see during the course of the older sister's attempt to ground herself again in her family and her past is Julia's justification for having struck out on her own. Admittedly, she ended up lost, but, as she later also admits, she at least "had a shot at the life I wanted." Norah has had the invalid mother for six years and a life she sums up as "like death … like being buried alive."

The contretemps with Norah serves to dispel any possible sad regrets regarding a misspent life by forcing Julia to contemplate in Norah the proper woman whom Julia herself might have been. The reencounter with Neil James provides another corrective disillusionment. As we have seen, Julia had considerably romanticized her first affair. But Rhys also shows how Julia is brought to revise her earlier self-gratifying revision of what were the facts of the case. Shortly after the final meeting with Mr. James, Julia observes to Mr. Horsfield that she really knows little about the other man—then or now. "You see, he never used to talk to me much. I was for sleeping with—not for talking to." It is not a flattering assessment, but she does at last know where she stands, and where she stood.

It is this knowledge that partly redeems the conclusion of After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie. When Julia, back in Paris, asks Mackenzie for a "loan," there is a continuing element of self-deception in the terminology that she employs. Nevertheless, she then knows what she is after. She wants the money as money, not as a sign of something else (his continuing concern, say). Although Julia is finally reduced to obvious mendicancy, asking solely for the cash, she is also more successful than when she earlier asked for something more. Presumably she will continue with that greater success in a game more demeaning (she is now a beggar) and less (she is no longer, in effect, hypocritically prostituting herself), which is another reason why the ending of the novel is not irredeemably bleak. Julia sits alone with the second drink Mr. Mackenzie bought her: "The street was cool and full of grey shadows. Lights were beginning to come out in the cafés. It was the hour between the dog and wolf, as they say." This poetically suggestive final sentence moves, as does the symbolic spiral, in two directions. Darkness is descending, but Julia, with a drink and some cash, is partly provided for, and there are some lights to counter the coming night. The hour of the wolf has not yet arrived (the reference here is not to men as sexual "wolves"—that time has come and gone—but perhaps to the finally untamable aspects of life, to the mother howling and dying as an animal); meanwhile Julia is somewhat more adept at managing the dogs in her life.

There is one final turn to the ending that Rhys appropriately appends to this subtly plotted work. The symbolic spiral in the painting was "flottant dans l'espace." It was supported by nothing, rested on nothing. And as Helen Nebeker especially observes, nothing is, indeed, a key issue in the novel. Julia's earliest memories are of being happy because of nothing and then of being frightened by nothing. At one point in Part One she describes one of her failures to give an account of herself: "And I felt as if all my life and all myself were floating away from me like smoke and there was nothing to lay hold of—nothing." By the end of the novel, she better knows the nothing that pervades her life. More specifically, she knows that her role in her family is nothing; that her dreams of her first love were nothing; that her hopes for her next affair have already come to nothing. But if Julia does not quite become, with that awareness, a forerunner of Camus' Sisyphus who can happily roll the rock of her own nothingness up the mountain of the nothingness of existence, neither is she crushed between the weight of those two voids. In that strained survival we see again how completely Rhys envisions the bleak life of her protagonist right down to the small sustaining victory achieved through the way in which Julia finally confronts the unredeemed darkness of her fate, and we also see how carefully the author structures the novel to sum up the emptiness of both the defeats and the victory.