After Leaving Mr Mackenzie

Six months after leaving Mr Mackenzie, Julia Martin's weekly cheques from het ex-lover stop. So she abandons her seedy Paris hotel for a dingy bedroom in Bloomsbury; vaguely planning to use her fading sexual charms to extract money from lovers old and new... Julia's London visit coincides with the death of her mother, long nursed by Julia's bitter, self-sacrificing sister Norah. The meeting of these two women, the farcical collapse of Julia's affair with a naïve young man, and her empty return to Paris and a hopeless future, make After Leaving Mr Mackenzie one of Jean Rhys's most subtle and haunting books.