SOURCE: "The Artist Emerging," in Critical Perspectives on Jean Rhys, edited by Pierrette M. Frickey, Three Continents Press, 1990, pp. 148-57.

In the following essay, Nebeker discusses the presentation of female archetypes, mythic patterns, and shifting perspective in After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie.

In her second novel, After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie, Jean Rhys presents a work so complex that it defies discussion. This complexity has led critics to a consistent oversimplification and misconstruing of the novel's impact. The plot is at once deceivingly simple in thrust and complicated in detail. The setting is April in Paris, the heroine Julia Martin, the time some ten years after World War I. As the story opens, Julia is living in a cheap room, recovering from psychic wounds incurred six months earlier, when Mr. Mackenzie had ended their love affair. A "decent Englishman," Mackenzie has been sending Julia a weekly allowance of three hundred...