Jeremy Hawthorn

Travel as Incarceration: Jean Rhys’s After Leaving Mr Mackenzie

It is impossible to consider a human relationship to space, to the way in which people occupy or traverse a particular geographical area, without taking into account the intersections of geographical, social, cultural and historical space. Our relation to different physical spaces is always mediated through the social, the cultural, and the historical, and for all of these axes the issue of gender is of fundamental importance. This truth is expressed and confirmed more insistently by some writers than it is by others. Few, if any, corroborate it so unremittingly as does Jean Rhys, and in her fiction, ‘culture’ invariably highlights the issue of gender.