[1][2] As Quartet explored Marya Zelli's relationship and breakup, this novel tracks Julia Martin's post-breakup months when her ex-lover's allowance cheques stop.

The Rhys heroine's age and social descent progress here from Quartet, reaching completion in Good Morning, Midnight (1939).

Themes include the lot of the outsider, the plight of the underdog, rich versus poor, female alienation, loneliness, destitution, death, grief, nostalgia for childhood and the quest for love.

Part One From her cheap hotel on the Quai des Grands-Augustins, Julia Martin inhabits Rive Gauche Paris, lunching alone in a German restaurant in the rue de la Huchette, drinking Pernod, wine and anything else.

She has survived for six months on 300 francs a week from ex-lover Mr Mackenzie, posted each Tuesday by high-handed solicitor Henri Legros.

One Tuesday Maître Legros writes informing Julia he is instructed to terminate the allowance, enclosing final payment of 1,500 francs.

Mr Horsfield, also back in London, takes her for outings, meals and drinks, but withdraws his support as his interest in the troubled Julia wanes.

Part Three Julia is back in her cheap Paris hotel on the Quai des Grands-Augustins, overlooking the Île de la Cité.

In the late afternoon, from inside a café on the rue Dauphine, Mr Mackenzie notices Julia approach on the street.

She looks untidy, set to continue in the downward spiral of other Rhys heroines, but accepts Mr Mackenzie's offer of a second drink.

Jean Rhys's material for this novel was drawn partly from her late 1927 visit to London for her mother's last days and funeral at Golders Green Crematorium.

[5] Showbusiness led to her demimondaine phase, financed by wealthy first lover Lancelot Grey Hugh Smith, until he ended the affair.

Her post-war Europe jaunts with first husband Jean Lenglet ended when he served prison time in France and was deported to Holland.

[1][2] Her family's indifference to the publication of The Left Bank and Other Stories (1927), and to her grief at the death of her first baby by Lenglet felt unjust to Rhys, who hints at bourgeois prejudice and hypocrisy in this and most of her novels.

In May 1928 she moved in to Tilden Smith's Holland Park house (located as per Mr Horsfield's in After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie) and began a relationship with him, formalising her separation from Lenglet on 19 June.

By the time of Quartet's release in September 1928, Rhys was writing After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie with Tilden Smith's full-time support.

West acknowledged the quality: "It is a terrible book about the final foundering to destruction of a friendless and worthless but pitiful woman.

"[8] Gerald Gould in The Observer called the novel: "A hard, clean, dry, desperate book, so rigid in its economy that its impressiveness seems almost contemptuous."

"[9][10] The Bookman (New York)'s Geoffrey Stone found the central character "sordid" but was "surprised to find that the meaning of the book as a whole appears just as clearly, and is much the same, as in any tale with a moral.