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Throughout the novel, Rhys references Kant, De Beauvoir, Sartre, Virginia Woolf and Epictetus, among others, using knowledge as a balm and escape hatch.

For Republicans, freedom does not mean, as Epictetus said, that "No man is free who is not master of himself."

Epictetus is well-known for articulating this concept in his "Enchiridion" and "Discourses."

Epictetus, a formerly enslaved Greek, became a highly influential Stoic philosopher studied by Marcus Aurelius.

“When you imagine some pleasure,” the Stoic philosopher Epictetus wrote to his students, “wait a while, and give yourself pause.”