MixedThe GuardianThe prose is smooth and supple as we follow Gwen’s journey from a privileged, if conflicted, white colonial girl to the bitter, angry woman we meet in 1936 ... Phillips’s choice to bypass both the writing and her literary life is perplexing. Her notorious experience with her mentor, Ford Madox Ford, who provided her pen name, goes unmentioned, as does the fact that Leslie Tilden Smith, her beleaguered husband, played a great part in introducing Gwen/Jean to literary London and getting her first books published. It could be that Phillips is steering us to look into the negative spaces of the novel to fill in the gaps, making his writing assume centre position through what is not said. Or is it that every novel shapes itself to reveal the author’s truth? Phillips writes of a dying empire, laying bare the human cost. If to Gwen it all lies in decay—temps perdi, meaning lost or wasted time in patois—it is because there is no longer room for her; but the island, and its terrible beauty, will endure.
