Walking through the London streets, Fitzrovia and Bloomsbury, I am thinking about the significance of the marginal figures Rhys writes about, her chorus girls and landladies. There is something radical going on in her portrayals of characters who wouldn't usually form the focus of literary fiction. She re-writes the script through these marginal characters, and they make a trajectory through all her novels.
Month: January 2019
It began to grow cold
Voyage begins with this sense of cold, this moment in the journey when the feeling of cold arrived and this lack was felt also as an absence of light and colour. The feeling things gave you deep down inside. Anna’s voyage and her life in England is portrayed as a form of exile; she is divided and experiences a sense of unreality, of existing in a dream. For Anna, England is a cold, claustrophobic and conforming place, of long streets and rows of houses all exactly alike.
Poles Apart
The fascination with snow, the blank page, the metaphors of discovery, of snow and ice, of mountains and icebergs, of movement through empty space. The epic struggle in the everyday, of being in ice.
The Street Walks In 