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.

A Title From Emily Dickinson, an Ending in the Dark

The novel takes its title from an Emily Dickinson poem — “Good morning, Midnight, / I’m coming home” — and the irony is exact: Sasha Jensen is a woman greeting darkness as a homecoming, embracing the night because the day has nothing left to offer her. Published in 1939, on the eve of the Second World War, Good Morning, Midnight is the bleakest and most uncompromising of Jean Rhys’s early novels, and its commercial failure was so complete that Rhys vanished from literary life for nearly three decades. She was so thoroughly forgotten that many assumed she had died; she was rediscovered only when a BBC adaptation prompted a search that located her living in obscurity, and the triumph of Wide Sargasso Sea in 1966 finally restored her to the canon. In the reappraisal that followed, Good Morning, Midnight came to be seen as the high point of her early period — the fullest realization of the interior, associative method she had been refining across four books.

Reading Rhys at Her Most Demanding

This is not the easiest place to begin with Rhys — that is Voyage in the Dark — but it is the most artistically ambitious of her early novels and the most rewarding for readers prepared for its difficulty. Its refusal of consolation, its unstable movement between present and memory, and its famously ambiguous final scene make demands that a more conventional novel would not, and Rhys meets the modernist standard of her great contemporaries while writing about a kind of life — female, poor, aging, dependent — that they largely ignored. Sasha is a heroine who has run out of options and very nearly out of self, rendered without sentimentality or rescue, and the novel’s unflinching attention to her constitutes a quiet act of literary justice. For readers interested in modernism, in the inner lives of women the era’s fiction overlooked, or in one of the twentieth century’s great prose stylists, Good Morning, Midnight is essential — a short, devastating book that lingers far longer than its length.

Decades after it was written, Good Morning, Midnight reads as startlingly modern — in its psychological honesty, its formal daring, and its refusal of redemption — and it has rightly taken its place among the essential British novels of the interwar period. It is the work in which Jean Rhys’s distinctive vision found its most complete early form.

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.