Saturday, December 23, 2006

Modern Classics: Good Morning, Midnight

Good Morning, Midnight (1939) by Jean Rhys was a book way ahead of its time. Its protagonist Sophia Jansen is an English woman in Paris. The facts that the heavy drinking protagonist is a woman and that the book largely narrates her sexual encounters and loneliness is what makes this book both very unusual for its time and so very relevant to ours.
This probably also accounts for its being overlooked until it was republished in the 1960s. Even today Rhys is better known for her prequel to Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre, Wide Sargasso Sea.

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