After Leaving Mr Mackenzie was published by Jonathan Cape in February 1930 and is Rhys’s second novel — the one that established her method: a woman alone, in a city, with not enough money, negotiating a world in which female survival depends on male generosity and male generosity depends on female youth and beauty. Julia Martin has been discarded by Mr Mackenzie — her latest protector, a married businessman who sends her a weekly allowance through his solicitor. When the allowance stops, Julia has nothing: no money, no work, no family, no future.
The Novel
The novel follows Julia through approximately two weeks — shuttling between Paris and London, visiting her dying mother, attempting to extract money from her sister, encountering former lovers, and confronting the reality that she is aging out of the economy of exchange that has sustained her.
Rhys’s achievement is tonal. Julia is not presented as a victim (she is too passive for that) or as a heroine (she is too damaged for that) or as a warning (the novel has no moral agenda). She simply is: a woman whose resources are running out, whose strategies are failing, whose future contains nothing she can imagine wanting. The prose registers this without commentary, without analysis, without the comforting distance of explanation.
London — Julia visits her dying mother in a nursing home and her respectable sister Norah, who has sacrificed her own life to care for the mother. The sisters’ encounter is one of Rhys’s most devastating scenes: Norah’s resentment of Julia’s “freedom” (which is actually destitution) meets Julia’s contempt for Norah’s “respectability” (which is actually servitude). Neither woman can help the other.
Mr Mackenzie — Julia confronts him in a restaurant and makes a small scene. He gives her money — not enough to change anything, just enough to confirm her dependency.
Mr Horsfield — a new man, decent but weak, who takes Julia to dinner, to bed, and then away from his life. He cannot save her because saving her would require more than he is willing to give.
Method
The novel is Rhys’s most restrained — colder and more controlled than Quartet, less lyrical than Voyage in the Dark, less formally experimental than Good Morning, Midnight. It achieves its effects through subtraction: what Julia does not say, does not feel, does not have. The white space around the text is as expressive as the text itself.
Collecting After Leaving Mr Mackenzie
First edition (Jonathan Cape, London, 1930): Blue cloth binding with darker blue lettering. Dust jacket (extremely scarce).
Identification points:
- Jonathan Cape imprint
- “First published 1930” stated
- 191 pages
Market values: Fine copies in dust jacket bring $2,000–$6,000. Pre-war Rhys first editions are uniformly scarce; After Leaving Mr Mackenzie had a small first printing and most copies were read to pieces or lost.
Without jacket: $300–$800.
First American edition (Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1931): Published one year later. $300–$600 in jacket.
As Rhys’s second novel and the book that refined her method for the masterpieces to follow, it occupies an important position in her bibliography — the point where experiment becomes command.