GOOD MORNING, MIDNIGHT
First edition of the great Modernist writer's fourth and "funniest" (Savory) novel.
Very good.
Price: $1,250.00
GOOD MORNING, MIDNIGHT
"But there you are, if you're determined to get people on the cheap, you shouldn't be so surprised when they pitch you their own little story of misery sometimes."
GOOD MORNING, MIDNIGHT follows the unhappy Sasha Jenson in and out of the bars, hotel bedrooms, shops, and public bathrooms of Paris, public-private spaces where one can be alone, or left alone, but which one must pay to occupy: whose rooms "have the power to confirm the exact social value of their occupants: they are therefore both menacing, and, as shelters, consoling" (Savory). Some decades later in a PARIS REVIEW interview, Rhys observed, "A room is, after all, a place where you hide from the wolves. That's all any room is."
In the same interview, Rhys recalled being "very hopeful" about the the novel's reception, "but then war was declared, almost immediately, and they didn't want books. [...] I was forgotten and I gave up writing." After a hiatus of more than 20 years, a well-received BBC radio adaptation of GOOD MORNING, MIDNIGHT interrupted Rhys's "turbulent and boring" private life in Cornwall and, bolstered by the admiring support of editor Diana Athill and sustained by a bottle of whisky a day, she began to write again. Another long hiatus began in 1979, enforced by death, but her reputation was and is too secure for forgetfulness to descend a second time.
Read more: Mellown, Jean Rhys: A Descriptive and Annotated Bibliography of Works and Criticism, A5a; Savory, Jean Rhys; Vreeland, Jean Rhys: The Art of Fiction No. 64, The Paris Review.
The Object
London: Constable & Company, (1939). 7'' x 5''. Original green cloth with dark blue spine lettering (variant binding, largely matching Cyril Connolly Collection copy in Mellown A5a: without blank front endpaper, as issued). In original price-clipped maroon dust jacket. 272, [2] pages. Pencil owner name to front pastedown. Light bumping and rippling to boards, slight spine lean. Light wear and chipping to jacket, sunning to spine.
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