Editors Reads Verdict
The most Chekhovian of Rhys's novels — events that might be dramatic in another writer's hands are rendered with such flat precision that their weight lands entirely through what they reveal about Julia's inability to find footing in any world. Nothing is resolved because nothing, in this world, resolves.
What We Loved
- The Chekhovian flatness — the refusal to dramatize — is a formal achievement that requires enormous control
- The portrait of Julia's economic and emotional situation is rendered with complete honesty and without sentimentality
- The London sections and the Paris sections create a contrast that clarifies Julia's displacement without explaining it
- The dying mother and estranged sister provide the novel's only glimpse of the world Julia came from
Minor Drawbacks
- The deliberate refusal of narrative resolution can frustrate readers expecting conventional dramatic structure
- Julia is less vividly characterized than Rhys's later protagonists — the flatness occasionally becomes genuine thinness
- The novel is the most schematic of Rhys's work — some sections feel like exercises in the method rather than fully achieved fiction
Key Takeaways
- → Women in early twentieth-century Europe without economic independence are dependent on a series of men, each relationship replacing the last without improving the situation
- → The past — family, origin, the person one might have been — is unavailable not because it is gone but because one has been severed from it by choices made under constraint
- → Drifting is not a character flaw but the logical response to a world in which no option offers security or genuine connection
- → Confronting those who have treated you badly changes nothing — the confrontation is an assertion of dignity that the world declines to receive
| Author | Jean Rhys |
|---|---|
| Publisher | W.W. Norton |
| Pages | 192 |
| Published | January 1, 1930 |
| Language | English |
| Genre | Classic Fiction, British Literature, Modernist Fiction |
The Chekhov of Her Generation
Jean Rhys published After Leaving Mr Mackenzie in 1930, her second novel after Postures (later retitled Quartet), and it is the work in which her method — the deliberate flatness, the refusal of conventional dramatic resolution, the rendering of marginal female experience through prose of devastating precision — is most purely realized. It is also the most purely Chekhovian of her books: events that are objectively significant (the death of a mother, the confrontation with a former lover, the loss of an income) are rendered with such studied understatement that their significance registers as absence rather than presence.
Julia Martin is living in a Paris hotel on a weekly allowance from her former lover, Mr. Mackenzie, who has tired of her and arranged the allowance specifically to forestall any scene. When the allowance stops and his lawyer delivers a final settlement check, Julia goes to the restaurant where she knows Mackenzie lunches, makes a brief, humiliating confrontation, and — on an impulse — goes to London, where her mother is dying.
The Confrontation
The confrontation with Mackenzie is the novel’s first and most deliberately anti-climactic scene. Julia rehearses what she will say, works herself up to the moment, and when she is in the restaurant, does nothing very effective: she says she despises him and throws money at him, and he is embarrassed, and she leaves. The moment she has been building to contains nothing, changes nothing, resolves nothing. This is Rhys’s method: the dramatic gesture is permitted but denied its dramatic consequence. Life continues in exactly the same direction as before.
The London visit is similarly organized around non-resolution. Julia’s mother is dying and does not recognize her. Her sister Norah, who has been caring for the mother at significant personal cost, is cold and judgmental. A man named Mr. Horsfield lends Julia money and is attracted to her, briefly, and then retreats. The mother dies. Julia returns to Paris.
The Prose of Minimal Precision
Rhys’s prose in this novel is at its most deliberately stripped. The flatness is the formal equivalent of Julia’s emotional condition: a woman who has been through enough that she no longer performs feeling for others and has begun to lose access to it herself. The prose records what happens without interpreting it, which means that the interpretation falls entirely to the reader, who must supply the emotional weight that the prose withholds.
This is a technique learned from Chekhov and Flaubert, and Rhys deploys it with unusual consistency. The risk is that the flatness becomes opacity — that the withholding exceeds what it can achieve — and in After Leaving Mr Mackenzie this risk is occasionally not avoided. But at its best, the method produces the specific effect Rhys is after: the sense of life passing without the protagonist being able to grasp it, rendered in prose so precise about surfaces that the depths register entirely through what the surfaces do not say.
Our rating: 4.1/5 — The most purely Chekhovian of Rhys’s novels — formally rigorous, emotionally demanding, and a necessary step toward the achievement of Wide Sargasso Sea.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is "After Leaving Mr Mackenzie" about?
Julia Martin, who has been receiving a small weekly allowance from a former lover, confronts him when it stops, returns to London to see her dying mother, and drifts. Rhys's second novel is the most Chekhovian of her work — nothing is resolved, nothing is dramatized, and the sense of life passing without the protagonist being able to grasp it is achieved entirely through prose of minimal, devastating precision.
What are the key takeaways from "After Leaving Mr Mackenzie"?
Women in early twentieth-century Europe without economic independence are dependent on a series of men, each relationship replacing the last without improving the situation The past — family, origin, the person one might have been — is unavailable not because it is gone but because one has been severed from it by choices made under constraint Drifting is not a character flaw but the logical response to a world in which no option offers security or genuine connection Confronting those who have treated you badly changes nothing — the confrontation is an assertion of dignity that the world declines to receive
Is "After Leaving Mr Mackenzie" worth reading?
The most Chekhovian of Rhys's novels — events that might be dramatic in another writer's hands are rendered with such flat precision that their weight lands entirely through what they reveal about Julia's inability to find footing in any world. Nothing is resolved because nothing, in this world, resolves.
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