And, there is the temptation to believe that she mostly wanted to shock her audience by forcing them to view the depravity of the post-war Parisian society. His name is Delmar, and he’s a very kind, pensive man who believes in simply taking life “as it comes. I know when I started figuring all of this out and reading 'Midnight' is like going back over old notes about figuring all of that out only without the look that stirred the longing for the allowance into that part of someone else and not with the crippling self doubt of my own that I get too damned often after I force me to go on being me (what else is there? Sasha also has a fairly positive association with two Russian men and with an artist friend of theirs, a Jewish man whom she and one of the friends visit. I cry for a long time - for myself, for the old woman with the bald head, for all the sadness of this damned world, for all the fools and all the defeated .

This changing of name is also a way of breaking from her family, her parents, who named her, of course. Perhaps this was just too much of an intellectual and emotional investment for me at this moment in time, or maybe this is Rhys taken too far into herself for my pleasure. The slim plot Rhys offers consists of Sasha drifting from café to café, or restaurant to cabaret, with one or another of these men, a drink at every stop. It didn’t take me long to know that, with the possible exception of Wide Sargasso Sea, I was reading them to have read them—to be done with them.The way Rhys goes about describing Paris is quite sinister, moving from one cheap hotel on dead-end street that backs out onto a dingy ally, to another. Deborah Eisenberg, author of Your Duck Is My Duck The last of the four novels Jean Rhys wrote in interwar Paris, Good Morning, Midnight is the culmination of a searing literary arc, which established Rhys as an astute observer of human tragedy.

I have come across very few characters that are as relentlessly terrified and lonely and unhappy as this one. The instances where an important truth was revealed were often slow in coming, or slower than I expected, and there were several, several pages of self-loathing to wade through before they were revealed.Jean Rhys (Mrs Tilden Smith) author of Voyage in the Dark, After Leaving Mr Mackenzie, Good Morning Midnight, etc.

People talk about the happy life, but that’s the happy life when you don’t care any longer if you live or die.Sasha lies distraught on the bed for several moments before getting up to see if René left her any money. Although early critics noted that Good Morning, Midnight was well written, they found its depressing storyline ultimately repellent.

I had read that it was vaguely autobiographical, and I sincerely hope that is not the case, for this is a book of so much despair and darkness that it was a struggle to continue to read. My feeling is you could argue all of these points depending on your analytic sensibilities and also you view of women and, obviously, feminism in particular. I don’t, however, think I was ever as wretched as Sasha Jansen, the narrator of Jean Rhys’ Good Morning, Midnight. Is the only choice to somehow be with a man who will not leave you, who will stay long enough to make you believe that happiness is possible, that life is not such a drudge, an unending rollercoaster, up and down, up and down but somehow not like a rollercoaster because more downs than ups?Was Jean Rhys an eccentric woman, like Dickinson; a social outcast unable to accept her place in the corseted roles attached to their gender at the time? You were mistrustful of people from the beginning, but you went along with it," and Sasha would go on a little longer, dancing around the topic and then she would throw a punch that landed right between my eyes and I would concede, "Oh, oh. An actress, Selma vaz Dias, a Rhys fan, had adapted GMM as a radio play, and needed Jean’s permission, but everyone was telling her Jean Rhys was dead. Her clothes were shabby, her shoes were worn out, she had circles under her eyes and her hair was straight and lanky.