There is a dark joy in the details in Jean Rhys’s writing, James Wood writes—“in the reportorial news that her fictions bring.”
” . These four books, similar in brevity, elegant attack, and bitter metaphysics, relate to one another like polished stones hewed from a single quarry. The narrator of “Good Morning, Midnight” is Sasha Jansen, but she could just as easily be Marya Zelli, the protagonist of “Quartet,” or Julia Martin or Anna Morgan .
Dominica, once a colonial possession of France, was ceded to the British at the start of the nineteenth century. Rhys, who was born Ella Gwendoline Rees Williams, the fourth of five children, came from the equivalent of white aristocracy. Her father was a Welsh physician who had arrived in 1881; on her mother’s side, Rhys’s great-grandfather, a Scot named James Lockhart, had twice been governor of Dominica, enriched by his ownership of sugar mills and slaves.
It is the same between the sexes. In Rhys’s fiction, men and women attract and repel each other like switched magnets, and learn no lessons from this doomed push-pull. The tough-minded Laurie tells Anna, in “Voyage in the Dark,” “If you give people a handle they’ll always take it.” Rhys heroines know this truth full well but still end up providing people, usually men, with an easy handle.
“Isn’t it awful losing a chance like that because you haven’t got a little money? . . . But I’m so damned shabby and, you know, when you’re shabby you can’t do anything, you don’t believe in yourself. And he notices clothes—he notices things like that. Fred, his name is. He said to me the other day, ‘If there’s anything I notice about a girl it’s her legs and her shoes.’ Well, my legs are all right, but look at my shoes. . . .
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