Good Morning, Midnight was published by Constable in London in April 1939 and was the last novel Jean Rhys published before her twenty-seven-year disappearance from literary life. It is the most accomplished of her four early novels — formally daring, emotionally devastating, and so precise in its rendering of a woman’s loneliness and self-destruction that reading it feels almost physically uncomfortable. It tells the story of Sasha Jansen, a middle-aged English woman returning to Paris to “drink herself to death,” who encounters instead a series of men whose intentions range from exploitation to genuine tenderness.
The Novel
Sasha Jansen is in Paris for two weeks — sent by a friend who paid for the trip as a kind of therapy. She has a small income, a hotel room, a strategy: stick to the safe cafés, drink moderately, buy a hat, avoid thinking about the past. The strategy fails immediately. Paris is saturated with memories: her dead baby, her failed marriage, her humiliation as a shop girl, her various encounters with men who used and discarded her.
The narrative moves fluidly between present and past — triggered by places, smells, songs. A street recalls a former lover; a bar recalls a former despair. The stream-of-consciousness technique owes something to Woolf but is harder-edged, less lyrical, more merciless. Sasha does not find beauty in her memories; she finds damage.
In the present, she encounters René — a young man who may be a gigolo, may genuinely desire her, may be planning to rob her. Their relationship develops over several days: meals, drinks, the careful dance of two people who both want something but cannot be honest about what. The novel’s ending — among the most debated in modern fiction — presents a sexual encounter that may be surrender, may be assault, may be both simultaneously.
Style
Rhys’s prose in Good Morning, Midnight achieves a concentration that her earlier novels only approached. The sentences are short, declarative, almost telegraphic — but they carry enormous emotional weight through accumulation. The effect is like a boxer’s jabs: each one is light; together they are devastating.
The novel uses present tense throughout — giving it an immediacy that makes the reader complicit in Sasha’s experience. We are inside her consciousness, seeing what she sees, feeling what she feels, unable to maintain the distance that past tense provides.
Disappearance and Rediscovery
The novel sold poorly on publication — partly because of its difficult subject matter, partly because Constable went bankrupt shortly after publication, partly because the war broke out five months later and literary London had other concerns. Rhys disappeared from public life: she was widely assumed to be dead.
In 1957, the BBC broadcast an adaptation of Good Morning, Midnight, prompting Rhys to contact her publisher and revealing that she was alive, living in obscurity in Devon, and working on a new novel. That novel — Wide Sargasso Sea (1966) — would make her famous. But Good Morning, Midnight is arguably her finest achievement: more compressed, more technically accomplished, more emotionally unbearable.
Collecting Good Morning, Midnight
First edition (Constable, London, 1939): Red cloth binding with black lettering. Dust jacket (extremely rare — most copies lost to wartime destruction and Constable’s bankruptcy).
Identification points:
- Constable & Co. imprint
- “First published 1939” stated
- 189 pages
Market values: Fine copies in dust jacket are essentially impossible — perhaps five to ten surviving copies. Estimates place them at $5,000–$15,000. Without jacket: $500–$1,500.
First American edition (Harper & Brothers, 1970): Published during the Rhys rediscovery. $75–$150 in jacket.
André Deutsch reissue (1967): The edition that made the book available again, published after Wide Sargasso Sea’s success. $100–$200 in jacket.
The original Constable first edition is one of the great rarities of twentieth-century women’s fiction — comparable in scarcity to the first edition of The Bell Jar (which was published under a pseudonym and similarly presumed lost).