For six months, Julia has lived alone in a drab Parisian hotel on an allowance from her ex-lover, Mr Mackenzie. When his cheques stop, Julia decides to leave France and return to London. Past her prime, exhausted by broken love affairs and addled by drink, Julia is tragically unable to find what she really wants – love.

Format: Paperback
Published: 2000, UK
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Pages: 176
ISBN 13: 9780141183947
ISBN 10: 0141183942

Julia Martin is in Paris and at the end of her rope. Once beautiful, she was taken care of by men. Now, after being dropped by her latest lover, Mr. Mackenzie, Julia is running out of luck and chances. A visit to London to see her ailing mother might offer an opportunity to start over–but it also brings her face to face with her distrustful sister, Norah, who can’t help but feel that Julia has only changed for the worse in the years since they last saw one another. And it proves difficult to escape the desultory romantic entanglements of Paris when a suitor follows her to England.

Nowhere is Jean Rhys’s talent for fully inhabiting the minds of her characters more apparent than in After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie, her masterful second novel. Rhys lays bare the desires and contradictions of the mercurial Julia, and all those trapped in her orbit, in this haunting depiction of life after the end of a tumultuous affair.