The Offences Against the Person Act of 1861, for instance, upheld that it was also illegal to give a pregnant woman any sort of drug with the intent of inducing abortion. In the coming years, there were a number of changes to this law, most of which simply added new specifications. Abortion was officially banned in England in the Malicious Shooting or Stabbing Act of 1803, in which it was declared that anyone who performed or somehow aided in an abortion would be subject to the death penalty or 14 years in a penal colony. Although abortion is now legal in the United Kingdom, it was outlawed until 1967, which is why Anna Morgan is forced to secretly find somebody willing to perform the procedure. Voyage in the Dark features a covert abortion, which taps into England’s anti-abortion history.

Wide Sargasso Sea remains her most acclaimed work, having garnered her several major literary awards and a place in the canon of postcolonial literature. It wasn’t until 1966 (after several decades of anonymity marked by two more marriages and an increasingly serious alcohol problem) that Rhys published Wide Sargasso Sea and rocketed to literary fame. Mackenzie, Voyage in the Dark, and Good Morning, Midnight-were met with mixed critical success. The three major novels that Rhys wrote during the 1930s- After Leaving Mr. Ford took her in as both a protégé and mistress, suggesting that she change her name to Jean Rhys and eventually facilitating the publication of her work, which often dealt with her own experiences of alienation as a woman at the hands of unjust lovers and an exclusionary society. In 1924, in the midst of a tumultuous marriage, Williams met the acclaimed English novelist Ford Madox Ford. After having a near-fatal abortion paid for by a former lover, Williams began to write. She then lived in Britain for nearly a decade, surviving on small acting roles and chorus parts.

Williams was ostracized for her Caribbean heritage and accent-she was eventually taken out of school because her instructors deemed her unable to rid herself of the West Indies accent that would prevent her from getting significant stage roles. At 16 she was sent to England, where she studied to be an actress.

Ella Gwendolyn Rees Williams was born in 1890 to a Welsh doctor and a Creole woman of Scots ancestry on the Caribbean island of Dominica (then a British colony).

A voyage in the dark