Volume 18, Number 9 · May 18, 1972
Without a Dog's Chance
By V.S. Naipaul
After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie
by Jean Rhys
Harper & Row, 191 pp., $5.95
Jean Rhys was born in the small Caribbean island of Dominica and went to England when she was sixteen, not many years before the 1914 war. Two hundred or even 150 years ago, when the sugar colonies of the Caribbean were valuable and important, the white West Indian in Europe was better known. Smollet satirized jumped-up Jamaican slave overseers taking the waters in Bath; Captain Marryat's father owned plantations and Negroes in Trinidad; Leigh Hunt was a Barbadian. But by the 1920s, when Jean Rhys began to write, the Caribbean and the Spanish Main belonged to antique romance; and the West Indian needed to explain himself.
Review, 2315 words
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