This is just one instance in which Anna Morgan, the figure at the center of the novel, finds her lived reality butting up against dismissive patriarchal expectations. It’s about a girl who is eighteen, but none of the men she meets believe her when she says that, because, as one points out, women always say they’re either eighteen or twenty-two. Molly said I had to add Voyage to my list. We were talking about an essay I wanted to write about representations of children in modernist literature. Molly pressed Voyage on me the semester I was studying for my comprehensive exams. Anyone who’s been to graduate school knows that this could be faint praise, but Molly cared as much about her teaching as about the books she taught.

The best courses I took in graduate school were the two I took with Molly. Most of the things I have to say about Rhys come from the person who first introduced me to her, Molly Hite, now retired but when I knew her a professor of English at Cornell. There’s a lot to talk about because Rhys’s fiction is such a challenge to how we talk about fiction. Even students who hate it get passionately caught up in our conversations. I’ve lost track of how many times I’ve taught this book, the third of Rhys’s five novels, but I know it’s never failed me yet. I’ve taught Jean Rhys regularly for more than ten years: the quietly devastating story “Learning to be a Mother,” perfect for showing students how much you can say about something that seems at first glance so slight the heartbreaking Good Morning, Midnight, with its hair-raising and endlessly discussable ending and, most of all, my true Rhys-love, the marvelous Voyage in the Dark.

Unshakeable by Molly MacKenzie