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 Bender's wording, as "the author of one...