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More About the Author
Product Description
Product Description
Jean Rhys was a talent before her time with an impressive ability to express the anguish of young, single women. In GOOD MORNING, MIDNIGHT Rhys created the powerfully modern portrait of Sophia Jansen, whose emancipation is far more painful and complicated than she could expect, but whose confession is flecked with triumph and elation. One of the most honest and distinctive British novelists of the 20th Century, Jean Rhys wrote about women with perception and sensitivity in an innovative and often controversial way. In GOOD MORNING MIDNIGHT (1939) she creates an unforgettable portrait of a woman forced to confront her inevitable loneliness and despair.
About the Author
Jean Rhys was born in Dominica in 1894. Coming to England aged 16, she drifted into various jobs before starting to write in Paris in the late 1920's. Her novels, often portraying women as underdogs out to exploit their sexualities, were ahead of their time and only modestly successful. From 1939 (when GOOD MORNING MIDNIGHT was written) onwards she lived reclusively, and was largely forgotten when she made a sensational comeback with 'Wide Sargasso Sea' in 1966. She died in 1979.
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First Sentence
'Quite like old times,' the room says. Read the first page Browse Sample Pages
Front Cover | Copyright | Excerpt | Back Cover
'Quite like old times,' the room says. Read the first page Browse Sample Pages
Front Cover | Copyright | Excerpt | Back Cover
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
28 of 29 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
It is no wonder that after the publication of this novel people assumed Jean Rhys had committed suicide. It is a dark, introverted, soul-searching novel. It's brilliance lies in the compassion with which Sasha is treated. This is a woman who is unquestionably at the end of her tether. Life occurs almost unconsciously to her. She drinks non-stop and thinks of fashion before eating. But these aren't superficial choices. They are the few soft whispers of a woman about to go over the brink. Throughout the novel you are given brief glimpses of her past as a shop assistant and the troubles in her marriage. In themselves the troubles which result from them are not ample enough to drive a normal woman to such desperation. You feel that the reason for her state of mind is more the result of a profound neglect of her individual spirit by men. She is led on to believe in a progression of being, but is abandoned to clutch at the ghosts of her old haunts in Paris. This is a sharp contrast to the ideas that we have about artistic scene of Paris in this time period. It is a more sincerely concentrated personal experience than most accounts. It is interesting to think of the end in contrast to the jubilant yeses of Molly Bloom in Ulysses. Sasha's yes is one of doom and resignation to a world that has flown past her.
Despite its depressing character, this novel is a fascinating look at a tendency to sink into a psychological state often ignored. It is also a subtle portrayal of an identity built on a knife's edge. Luckily, Ms Rhys did survive this novel (however unhappily). It is a miracle that she did considering the violent lack of self worth of Sasha; to have imagined such a person must have been terrifying indeed.
17 of 19 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
Bewildered and adrift in Paris, Sasha drinks away her gloom in cafés, trying to forget a man who once loved her...She's a sensitive middle-aged woman struggling with her life and her pessimism in a hostile world where "there is no past, no future, there is only this blackness, changing faintly, slowly, but always the same". Both desesperate and strong, with a great sense of humour and a true psychological depth, the heroine is incredibly modern. Partly autobiographical, the story is told in the first person which sounds more intimate and moving.In the background, the Bohemian Paris of the 1930's with its artists and gigolos... No real plot, but a bitter sweet atmosphere _recalling Fitzgerald_ and the beauty of Jean Rhys' poetic prose. A melancholic and impressionist novel. After Good Morning, Midnight, Jean Rhys disappeared and her novels went out of print, she was even thought to be dead!! Yet, as the result of a successful adaptation of Good Morning, Midnight on the BBC in 1958, she was finally rediscovered; she was at work on a novel entitled "Wide Sargasso Sea"...
20 of 23 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
Written at the height of the modernist movement, Rhy's 'Goodmorning Midnight' adopts the 'stream of consciousness' technique seen also in the work of Woolf and Lawrence. This style, which so successfully highlights the personal torments and lonliness of Sasha, Rhy's main protagonist also illustrates the rhythms and atmosphere of modern Paris. The book focuses on the thought process of Sasha, as she comes to terms with her life and faces up to her fears. Rhy's words tenderly and tentively illustrate the frustration, depression and isolation of a single foreign woman in a capital city. The deep concentration on the character of Sasha enables the reader to enter her mind and thus experience both her pain and her moments of joy. A rewarding and revitalising read.
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Most Recent Customer Reviews
A tale of psychological woe
At first I thought this novel was deeply confusing with it's free and weaving narrative and intermittent French sentences which left me thinking - What is actually going on?! Read more
Published 2 months ago by BookWorm64
Gloom, Doom and a Rented Room
The late 1930s. Sasha Jensen, painfully aware of getting older and losing her looks, is lonely, bitter and 'alcohol-dependent', but saved from disaster by a small inheritance. Read more
Published 11 months ago by Bob Ventos
Excellent
For me this book combines the highest integrity of the modernist enterprise with the pervasive pessimism of emergent postmodernism. Read more
Published on 11 Oct 2008 by HexOmega
Good Morning, Midnight
A bleak, compelling novel, detailing the despair of someone who has been battered and bruised by life. Read more
Published on 20 July 2007 by Rich
romanticism and loneliness of a Parisian gutter life
Paris is the city to get lost and drunk in. This can be seen by the amount of literature concerned with these two essential elements of life, and Jean Rhys has conjured up an... Read more
Published on 31 May 2005 by P. Millar
so good it hurts
and it really hurts. this book is beautifully bleak. it is a journey through a lost womens mind and memory and self loathing. Read more
Published on 16 April 2003
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