Jean Rhys impeccable Voyage in the Dark chronicles such a descent, or tragic voyage, through the rise and fall of Anna Morgan’s love affair with a wealthy Englishman. While a first love can be a period of intensely effervescent emotion and passion, the decline and death of the ill-fated romance is often a harrowing and hellish plunge into the darkness of pain and sorrow. ‘ They watch you, their faces like masks, set in the eternal grimace of disapproval.’ 'Her eloquence in the language of human sexual transactions is chilling, cynical, and surprisingly moving' 'A wonderful bitter-sweet book, written with disarming simplicity' If you enjoyed Voyage in the Dark, you might like James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, also available in Penguin Classics. From 1939 (when Good Morning, Midnight was written) onwards she lived reclusively, and was largely forgotten when she made a sensational comeback with her account of Jane Eyre's Bertha Rochester, Wide Sargasso Sea, in 1966.

Her novels, often portraying women as underdogs out to exploit their sexualities were ahead of their time and only modestly successful. Coming to England aged 16, she drifted into various jobs before moving to Paris, where she began writing and was 'discovered' by Ford Madox Ford.

Jean Rhys (1894-1979) was born in Dominica. It is the story of an unhappy love affair, a portrait of a hypocritical society, and an exploration of exile and breakdown all written in Rhys's hauntingly simple and beautiful style. Voyage in the Dark was first published in 1934, but it could have been written today. Her childish dreams have been replaced by the harsher reality of living in a man's world, where all charity has its price. But there, dismayed by the unfamiliar cold and greyness, she is absolutely alone and unconsciously floating from innocence to harsh experience.

Working as a chorus girl, Anna drifts into the demi-monde of Edwardian London. 'It was as if a curtain had fallen, hiding everything I had ever known,' says Anna Morgan, eighteen years old and catapulted to England from the West Indies after the death of her beloved father.

Voyage in the dark by jean rhys