What happened to separate Hester and Anna isn’t clear, though there are suggestions Hester pushed the girl out. After her father’s death her stepmother, Hester, sold their property in the West Indies and took the girl to England. Their affair is quiet, secretive, and Anna is hopelessly naïve and apparently without will of her own as she is pushed and pulled in this direction and that by disapproving landladies and Walter and Walter’s friend Vincent who seems to act as a mouthpiece for Walter when things get difficult.Īnna is poor and she is friendless. In the evening they bump into two men, and this meeting proves life-shifting for Anna as she embarks on an affair with one of them, Walter, a mysterious, welathy man who sleeps with her and leaves her money.
She is working as an actress in a touring troupe and she’s sharing a room with an older single woman, Maudie. We follow the fortunes of Anna Morgan, an eighteen year old woman recently arrived from the West Indies. It feels like the beginning of Rhys’s story, the place where she began to lose hope. Voyage in the Dark is the same, though the storm is gentler and its build slower and it’s more bearable than the others. You’ve survived, but not without being wounded. Reading Rhys is like being caught in a sudden squall: you know it’s not going to last very long and that your fears are pointless and misguided, and yet the wind whips you, the rain pummels down and all your reserves are spent, and then it’s over and your hair is plastered to your head, your clothes ruined, there’s water in your shoes and you’re exhausted. Both my prior reads of Rhys have been fraught short, little books in which the protagonist flops from one day to the next drunk, desperate, hopeless and aggressive, making the reading of them emotionally tumultuous.
I’ve read a couple of other books by Rhys – Good Morning, Midnight and Wide Sargasso Sea – and both are excellent books, but still I approached Voyage in the Dark with a sense of trepidation.
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