“I liked the room and the red carnations on the table and the way he talked and his clothes—especially his clothes. It was a pity about my clothes, but anyway they were black. ‘She wore black. Men delighted in that sable colour, or lack of colour.’ A man called “Coronet” wrote that, or was it a man called “A Peer?””

—Jean Rhys, from Voyage in the Dark, 1934.