Strikingly, Rhys reflects the relative power and status of her characters through the way that they relate to and inhabit London. The tone of the novel beautifully reflects this vulnerability: written in close first person, the narrative is in turns intensely claustrophobic and surreally dreamlike, mirroring the perspective of a young woman detached from society, with limited power to make an impact on the world. Walter suggests shortly after meeting her that she should take singing lessons, because he and his friend Vincent think they can get her “something much better” than the chorus, and Vincent insists that she’s going to be “a great girl one of these days.” She works as a chorus girl, which also functions symbolically in the novel, suggesting a life lived as part of an identity-less, marginal group rather than the “main act.” The male characters in the novel are obsessed with her becoming more successful -“getting on,” as Rhys terms it. In Voyage in the Dark, Anna is alone in London and very vulnerable, an orphan without a support network or recourse to financial stability. Throughout her fiction, Rhys writes brilliantly about women on the margins. When she meets Walter-older, richer, crucially male-she soon becomes dependent on him, but his careless wielding of power ultimately destroys her chances of happiness. Written in 1934 (but set twenty years earlier), Voyage in the Dark charts what Rhys termed the “downward career” of Anna, a chorus girl recently moved to England from the West Indies, and disempowered by her gender, class, and financial situation. I was instantly struck by how similar the issues she’d been exploring nearly a hundred years previously were to those making headlines. Nearly ten years later, in October 2017, the #MeToo movement was taking off globally and I happened to be rereading Rhys. With naïve teenagerly empathy, I experienced the world of the novel as pure emotion, sucked into the intensity of its depiction of first love, abandonment, and isolation. The first time I read Voyage in the Dark by Jean Rhys, I was about the same age as Anna, its eighteen-year-old protagonist.