London: Constable, 1934

8vo, pp. 219, 31pp. advertisements bound in at rear. Original blue-grey boards, lettered in black to spine. Illustrated dust jacket. Offsetting to endpapers, browning and foxing to text block. A very good copy in a very good dust jacket, (white) rear panel a little darkened, some light chipping to top edge, most noticeable at head of spine, and with a little tape strengthening to verso.

First edition. Larry McMurty’s copy, with his distinctive stirrup bookplate to front pastedown.

Born in Domenica in the West Indies in 1890, Jean Rhys was sent to England to live with an aunt in 1906, and briefly trained to be an actress at RADA. At the age of 20 she had an affair with a wealthy stockbroker which ended badly, and almost died as a result of an illegal abortion following an affair with another man. These events provide the raw material for Voyage In The Dark, her third novel.

Her second book, After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie (1931), had been published by Cape, but Voyage In The Dark's unrelentingly bleak subject matter -- and Rhys' explicit, boundary-pushing treatment of it -- resulted in them turning the book down, but it was picked up by Michael Sadleir at Constable, subject to Rhys agreeing to change the ending.

In the final paragraph of Rhys’s typescript of the novel her central character, Anna Morgan, dies of complications following her backstreet abortion:

' And the concertina-music stopped and it was so still so still and lovely and it stopped and there was the ray of light along the floor like the last thrust of remembering before everything is blotted out and blackness comes....'

Rhys deleted this, and replaced it with the ending which appears in the published book:

' Thinking about mornings and about being new & fresh & misty days when anything might happen & about starting all over again --'

Other textual differences include several deletions and amendments to the delirium-induced stream-of-consciousness remembrances of Anna's childhood, and deletions of the landlady's references to the bloodied state of Anna's bed linen and mattress, possibly deemed too graphic for the time of the book's publication.

Between 1939 and 1966, Jean Rhys disappeared from view. She had been living in near destitution, a mentally fragile alcoholic, and the publication in 1966 of Wide Sargasso Sea, the book which secured both her fame and her reputation, came too late to make the self-proclaimed 'doormat in a world of boots' happy.

The success of her last book has also unfairly overshadowed her four pre-War novels: unremittingly bleak, all of them, but for the most part written with the sure, spare hand that characterises the best of Hemingway. Critical opinion holds Voyage In The Dark to be the best of them.

A rare survivor in the dust jacket, from the library of the author and bibliophile Larry McMurtry. The bookplate's design derives from the stirrup branding iron used by McMurtry's cattle farmer family.