Featured

Quartet, Café Lavenue

September 17, 2019August 7, 2020 / Anna Evans / 2 Comments

My starting point is to try and locate Café Lavenue. I have found a photograph, by chance, which suggests that it lay on a corner, an intersection somewhere along the Boulevard Montparnasse. The photograph shows where the street meets or is crossed by another street, and that there is a metro station in front. Lavenue looks to occupy the building, in typically grand Parisian style. I have a hunch that I may be able to locate the intersection and that the building itself may be unchanged.

Eugène Atget

June 13, 2019June 13, 2019 / Anna Evans / Leave a comment

Atget’s project to photograph a disappearing Paris, places him in the tradition of street photography and the flâneur, observing the city, preserving and capturing its details and subjects. His photographs capture a moment contained within the spaces of a Paris in flux. They capture the transitory, fleeting glimpses of courtyards, streets, shop windows, interiors and reflections.

Violette

March 15, 2019March 20, 2019 / Anna Evans / Leave a comment

Leduc's attentiveness to her marginal subject, and the way she writes about the city reverberate with me. Like the transient figures in Jean Rhys's novels, she exists in the same fine line between inside and outside; and occupies the city as another layer of its movement. She exists side by side with the residents of the city, the passersby; and yet is so invisible. They only see her when she reaches out her hand to beg...

Maps

December 4, 2018January 9, 2019 / Anna Evans / 2 Comments

Old Paris leaves its clues everywhere, like the way the old street names remain in some places, only crossed out.

Featured

The Street Walks In, Or, Paris is Porous

November 25, 2018March 13, 2020 / Anna Evans / Leave a comment

My title, And The Street Walks In, is from a passage in Good Morning, Midnight, one that comes to mind on my visit to Paris. It is one of the most arresting moments in the book. The street walking in, a striking image. As though the street were coming to summon her back, to reclaim her.

Featured

Tracing a route

November 23, 2018March 13, 2020 / Anna Evans / Leave a comment

Tracing a route through the books and touching sometimes on the journeys Rhys herself took, I am mapping them through place and through a series of journeys, starting from London in Voyage in the Dark, to Paris in Quartet, the Paris and London of After Leaving Mr Mackenzie, and returning to Paris in Good Morning, Midnight.

Featured

What they call an impasse

November 21, 2018June 4, 2019 / Anna Evans / Leave a comment

A cheap hotel in Paris. Hotel rooms often figure in Jean Rhys books, and this particular hotel is situated in an impasse, that most evocative of French place names. They can be found everywhere in Paris, and often they are named. Threaded through the book are some possibilities that might help me to pinpoint its location, and from the map I can identify a few lines which lead to nowhere, dead ends.