Good Morning, Midnight

From Emily Dickinson to Paris

The title comes from Emily Dickinson’s poem 77: “Good Morning — Midnight — / I’m coming Home — / Day — got tired of Me — / How could I — of Him?” The poem’s reversal — morning and midnight exchanged, the speaker turning away from the day toward the dark — establishes the novel’s central movement. Sasha Jensen has given up on the day, and the novel follows her through a Paris that is itself a kind of midnight: the cafés, the cheap hotels, the streets that she knows from better and worse times.

Jean Rhys published Good Morning, Midnight in 1939, her fourth novel in twelve years, and then fell silent for twenty-seven years. It sold poorly, was out of print, and was rediscovered only after Wide Sargasso Sea in 1966 restored her reputation. It is now generally considered the most formally accomplished of her early work — the place where the stream-of-consciousness method Rhys had been developing reaches its fullest expression.

Sasha’s Consciousness

Sasha Jensen — “Sophia” to herself, “Sasha” to the world — is returned to Paris on borrowed money after years away. She is in her late thirties, she has been a secretary and a wife and many other things, she has had a child who died, she has had experiences she cannot entirely remember and cannot entirely forget. She drinks in cafés. She avoids mirrors. She is ambushed by memories at unpredictable moments — a dress, a street, a phrase in French returns her to something that happened years ago with a vividness that makes the present feel ghostly by comparison.

Rhys renders this consciousness without the scaffolding of explanation or summary. The reader moves with Sasha through her days and her memories without always knowing clearly where the present ends and the past begins. The formal achievement is the naturalness of this: the ambiguity does not feel like technique but like the actual experience of a mind that has been so thoroughly shaped by its past that past and present are not cleanly separable.

René and the Final Scene

A young man — possibly a gigolo, possibly something else — attaches himself to Sasha, and the relationship that develops between them is the novel’s present-tense narrative armature. René is both a threat and, in Sasha’s ambivalent reading, something like a mirror: another person drifting, surviving, performing a role that the world has assigned to them. The relationship ends badly, with a violence that Sasha experiences as both assault and encounter.

The novel ends with an old man — Sasha’s downstairs neighbor, a figure of age and decay she has been trying to avoid — coming to her room. She opens her arms to him. It is the novel’s most discussed and most deliberately ambiguous moment: is this surrender, or despair, or a form of acceptance, or something that cannot be named? Rhys does not specify. The ending is the novel’s formal conclusion — the inward spiral reaching its final point — and the refusal of clarity is the point.

Our rating: 4.4/5 — Rhys’s most formally accomplished early novel — the stream-of-consciousness reaches its fullest expression here, and the final ambiguity is one of the great endings in British modernist fiction.