I put my book down to think about how life was for me when in my 20’s. They ‘were’ some of my hardest years .....I ran away for a couple of years ( Paris and London too)....’running’ is the word....There were days ... I ate large amounts of sugar - instead of real food - the way Sasha drank. Figure 1: The view by day of the German and Soviet pavilions in Paris, 1937. The area they flank was, and still is, named Place de Varsovie. By permission of the Bureau International des Expositions. Money. Every care in the world centers on money, swirls around money like a whirlpool. She borrows money from friends, some give her money out of exasperation or kindness or … whatever.

Jean Rhys | Books | The Guardian Where to start with: Jean Rhys | Books | The Guardian

I preferred this to the more formalised Wide Sargasso Sea. This felt like an author baring her soul. Apparently, it sunk without trace when published and Rhys, as a result became a recluse for the rest of her life. I’d go straight from the memoir into Voyage in the Dark. Told by a vulnerable newcomer to London from the Caribbean, Rhys’s third novel draws on her own experience of love, heartbreak, hope and loneliness to create an unforgettable portrait of its protagonist Anna Morgan. This novel is a great example of Rhys’s talent for capturing the way alienated and victimised women feel. I say in a loud, aggressive voice: ‘Go out and get a bottle of brandy,’ take money out of my bag and offer it to him. In the present, Sasha goes to the Luxembourg Gardens the day after she was supposed to meet the Russian. Funnily enough, she runs into the other Russian man, who is clearly fond of her. His name is Delmar, and he’s a very kind, pensive man who believes in simply taking life “as it comes.” He also senses that Sasha is lonely and says that he, too, used to feel isolated and alone—until, that is, he started forcing himself to be social. Thinking companionship will also do Sasha some good, he arranges to introduce her the following day to a painter friend of his named Serge. Serge is an eccentric painter who lives in Paris. Delmar introduces Sasha to him one day as a way of helping her make friends to distract her from her sorrow and loneliness. The three of…His second goodbye is final and Sasha’s mind, already teetering on the edge of insanity, begins its slow, unavoidable journey to self-destruction. “Did I love Enno at the end? Did he ever love me? I don’t know. Only, it was after that that I began to go to pieces. Not all at once, of course. First this happened, and then that happened” (143). For some reason I am very vexed at this. I start wondering why I am there at all… I want to get away. I want to be out of the place […] I want to go by myself, to get into a taxi and drive along the street, to stand by myself and look down at the fountains in the cold light. Holden, Kate. 1999. ‘Formations of Discipline and Manliness: Culture, politics and 1930s women's writing’, Journal of Gender Studies, 8/2: 141-157

Good Morning, Midnight Quotes by Jean Rhys - Goodreads Good Morning, Midnight Quotes by Jean Rhys - Goodreads

Mr. Lawson is a man Sasha once dated very briefly. When they parted ways, Mr. Lawson told her to reach out if she ever passed through Brussels, where he lived. Later, Sasha and Enno were… Predictably, given Sasha’s paranoia, the meeting proceeds awkwardly. At one point, Mr. Blank inquires about her ability to speak French:I had meant to get this man to talk to me and tell me all about it, and then to be so devastatingly English that perhaps I should manage to hurt him a little in return for all the many times I’ve been hurt . . . ‘Because I think you won’t betray me, because I think you won’t betray me . . .’ Now it won’t be so easy. (73) A room? A nice room? A beautiful room? A beautiful room with bath? Swing high, swing low, swing to and fro...This happened and that happened... I have an irresistible longing for a long, strong drink to make me forget that once again I have given damnable human beings the right to pity me and laugh at me. Rhys’s mentor and lover Ford Madox Ford. Photograph: CSU Archv/Everett/Rex Features The odd one out

Good Morning, Midnight - Penguin Books UK

In an essay on Rhys, Jamaica Kincaid and Michelle Cliff, Mary Lou Emery argues that these writers are invested in writing against the ‘European epistemology of the visual – sight as the dominant way of knowing’ (Emery 1997: 259). Emery proposes that forms of representation predicated on the imagination as ‘image-making process’ are bound to ‘an image-producing and consuming global capitalism’ and seem ‘also inseparable historically from the "imperial eye" or "commanding gaze" of colonialist practice and discourse’ (261). She reads these Caribbean women writers as inscribing ‘counterdiscursive revisions’ of narrative devices which ‘figure' visuality. This revision - in which, for example, the device of ekphrasis is extended to ‘excess’, or its absence rendered a ‘significant present’ - serves to expose ‘the constitutive processes of the colonialist imagination’, and also creates ‘resistance to it, renewing vision for subversive and newly creative purpose’ (262). Extending and twisting this argument, I propose that Good Morning, Midnight presents a counterdiscursive refiguration of the lofty Image of thought as Deleuze describes it - in image composed of the presuppositions that attend a universal ‘I think’. This refiguration is foregrounded early in the text in Sasha’s encounter with her fascist tormentor, Mr Blank. In assigning him this name Rhys is clearly parodying his inability to comprehend Sasha in a humane manner: there is a capitalised unthinking ‘Blank’ where his compassion should be. He derides Sasha’s nonsensical response to his demand and calls her a ‘helpless little fool’ ( Good Morning, Midnight, 24), [1]but her nonsense and her inability to make sense of his mispronounced demand to find the cashier serve to make him see her and she becomes a visible irritant rather than remaining an invisible cog in his capitalist machine. Her nonsense serves to stall his business (his cheque is not delivered), and is her means of escape from the oppressive situation. It is a refutation of the capitalist, imperialist ethic of mastery that he embodies and throughout the novel Sasha’s act of thinking is contrasted to established and fascist forms of thought. [2] Repeatedly Sasha encounters cliché and prejudice, and Rhys depicts Sasha’s ‘nonunitary subjectivity’ as a navigation through these things, a matter of surviving them and affirming a different act of thinking. [3]Going through life unnoticed, in Sasha’s mind, is an impossibility. In her return visit to Paris, she feels as though she is always recognized when re-entering her old haunts. Given her paranoidal instincts, this is probably a false assessment. However, in her mind, a trip to a favorite restaurant dissolves into a nightmare of humiliation. I had some thoughts before hand this would turn out to have a strong feminist viewpoint, and it does to some extent, only her women are more helpless and sad rather than angry or militant, and there is no poisoned chalice towards men, with her rants feeling aimed more internally. Sasha does have a saving grace though, that being humour, her willingness to see the comedy, even absurdity, in the most bitter memories and humiliating encounters, and there would be many of them. Jean : my bitter enemy next door is now telling everybody very loud and clear that I’m an imposter “impersonating a dead writer called Jean Rhys” – it’s a weird feeling being told you are impersonating yourself… you think : Maybe I am!

Good Morning, Midnight; Good Night, Modernism - JSTOR Good Morning, Midnight; Good Night, Modernism - JSTOR

There was another section in this book that I did a lot of thinking about. Sasha was only 25 years old - single - she saw herself too thin, dirty and haggard. Her clothes were shabby, her shoes were worn out, she had circles under her eyes and her hair was straight and lanky. She was so incredibly critical of herself. Sasha DID experience suffering from loss and tragedy .....Doniger mentions literature in her argument and, indeed, the theme of wearing masks is a common one. However, in Jean Rhys’s Good Morning, Midnight (1938), the consequences of removing one’s mask reveals the dangers which arise from such an act. The masks people wear, and the consequences of removing them, pervades Rhys’s novel. For the book’s protagonist, Sasha Jensen, removing her mask results in her embrace of death.