Told in the first-person from Anna’s POV, the novel’s prose is loose, vague, discursive-often a kind of dreamlike stream of consciousness. Rhys’s style is certainly “interesting”-for lack of a better word. When a variety of abortifacient tablets don’t work, Anna has to rely on an old musical-theatre friend’s connections to a back-street abortionist, the bill for which is footed by Walter-though the child is not his. Finally or fatefully, the inevitable occurs. She drifts from one experience to another, sometimes the early twentieth-century equivalent of a modern-day paid escort and other times little more than a streetwalker. Her extreme dependence (which she chooses to believe is “love”) and her West-Indian origins are no longer a charm but a liability. At those moments, she erupts: breaks things, shouts, or puts lit cigarette tips to the skin of the offender.
She appears to have no will of her own, doing almost all anyone suggests-unless she detects the hint of a sneer from him or anyone else. In Southsea, she meets Walter Jeffries, a stockbroker twice her age, and ends up becoming his mistress. By the time she’s 19, Anna’s touring English cities with a musical comedy troupe. In the end, the financial responsibility is too much for the widow, and the young woman, already showing signs of straying from respectability, is cut loose. Hester’s plan is to provide the girl with enough of an education to allow her to be gainfully employed or married.
After her father’s death, a young woman, Anna Morgan, is brought from the Caribbean island of Dominica to Edwardian England by her stepmother.
0 kommentar(er)
