Good Morning, Midnight

Abstract

In the 1930s more than any other decade of this century English writers exaggerated the moral, social, and realistic content of art. Among the many important observations that Samuel Hynes makes in his excellent study of the decade, The Auden Generation,¹ is the fact that the major writers of the period who took up the social and political causes were from the middle class, most of them came from professional families, and were educated at Oxford and Cambridge. In spite of the fact that Rhys wrote precisely of what it was like to be down and out in both Paris and London, her fiction was not a literature of social engagement. Even by 1939 her writing seemed untouched by the devastating political and military events which had occurred and the even more horrendous ones which were on the horizon. A passing reference in Good Morning, Midnight to Franco’s Spain and the fact that it is October, 1937, are the only indications that the outside world has changed very much since Marya Zelli first came to Paris in the aftermath of World War I. Set against the 1930s writing of Graham Greene, George Orwell and nearly every other English prose writer of the period, with the exception in a very different way of Henry Green, her work continued to rest on the power of style rather than new subject matter, intuition rather than analysis, the private rather than the public self.