I completed this book on a flight from LA to NY on 10/11/2000. This was my first reading experience by Jean Rhys. I learned that Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis included Jean Rhys on her roster of favorite authors. That's why I bought the book. I was curious to learn what 'tickled her fancy'. At first...the book was 3 stars...but after a day or two had passed I realized that the book had quite an impact on me. I had just finished an A+ book (The Notorious Dr. August)...so, maybe that's why I didn't give this 5 stars. It explores loneliness, living on the edge, dealing with death, depression, the cheeriness of childhood, and the search for love. So, you can imagine why Jacqueline Kennedy loved this author. I felt the main character, Julia, was easily identifiable by Jackie. Mr MacKenzie was her Onassis and Mr. Horsfield was her own Mr. Tempelsman in many ways. Although, I saw Julia as a sort of prostitute "in cognito" style. I did gasp when I read 'She's gone'. 'Gone'. That was the word. It struck me because my own sister-in-law called me with those exact words when my mother passed away. And when she wrote 'Nothing matters. Nothing can be worse than how I feel now, nothing.' I gasped again because in my eulogy to my mother I started it with those two words "Nothing matters"...as that was how I felt initially. Therefore, if you know anyone dealing with grief this book should help during some trying moments. Overall, the book leaves you slightly depressed at the end. It went full circle. There were some extraordinarily good lines in this book. One favorite: Every day is a new day. Every day you are a new person.

After Leaving Mr. MacKenzie (1930) repeats the effective Jean Rhys formula: a broken woman of uncertain age, shattered by hypersensitivity, alcoholism, emotional abuse, vague mental illness, and other 'pathological cruelties of everyday life,' bravely attempts to face another day, suffering self-hatred and self-recrimination with each step of the way. The novel begins with anti-heroine Julia Martin in the last stages of a romantic affair with pompous, thick - skinned blowhard Mr. MacKenzie. MacKenzie has provided Julia with financial support since the termination of their dalliance, but now declines to continue to do so. Financially and emotionally destitute, Julia leaves Paris and returns to London, where, "hoping to rest," she unexpectedly discovers her extended family gathered around their dying mother.

Like Jean Genet, Rhys wrote a series of novels about permanent social outsiders and outcasts, and, like Genet, Rhys had only one dark if very human vision to express. Other novelists such as Erskine Caldwell and Muriel Spark similarly wrote novels of extremely narrow focus (Caldwell's Tobacco Road, Spark's Not To Disturb and The Driver's Seat), but were also capable of more varied, optimistic, and expansive works. The antiheroes in Genet's novels find a means of empowering and centering themselves through narcissism, violence, dominance, sexual expression, or mysticism; but Rhys' nonplussed female protagonists are perpetually at square one, never the better for their defeated plans or self-sabotaged efforts. Sadly, Julia finds relief only in brief moments of spontaneous rage or cruelty.

Rhys had an acute talent for portraying women in and under such conditions, but it's undeniable that Rhys' vision of harrowing experience, rote abandonment, and human indifference was projected outward onto every facet of her fictional landscapes. The curtains and wallpaper are always faded, the rented rooms shabby, the maids surly, the proprietresses petty and suspicious, the food tasteless, the milk rancid, relatives disdainful. In fact, Rhys created an entire universe of human desolation in each of her five novels, one from which none of the characters, young or old, male or female, wealthy or without means, are exempted; some merely play the game better and have more resources. One of the most satisfying elements in After Leaving Mr. MacKenzie is Rhys' brutal, very focused examination of those sides of human nature which Western societies prefer to privately deny and publicly avoid.

All of Rhys' anti-heroines are socially disenfranchised, emotionally wounded, needy, gullible, and financially insecure; but they are simultaneously often ill tempered, manipulative, callous, arrogant, amoral, and almost entirely self - absorbed. Julia Martin is Rhys' most hard-bitten protagonist, having none of the wisdom or humor that Sasha Jansen has in fourth novel Good Morning, Midnight, nor the innocence of Rhys' early ingénues. Somnolent and easily wounded Julia is acutely sensitive but only occasionally empathetic to the reality of others, unless, in the moment, she sees herself reflected within them. Julia is also a listless parasite and psychic vampire who lives off the emotions, energy, and money of the men with whom she has casual affairs; except for brief periods of work and a failed marriage, this is how she has provided for herself as an adult. In one grim but revelatory scene, the willful Julia indifferently tells the man she is about to lose that she can get another meal ticket any time she wishes, as she always has in the past. Is she speaking out of defensiveness, or simply telling the truth about her power and experience? For Julia, moments of happiness, enthusiasm, or pleasure are fleeting and as far away as the stars.

Readers may wonder exactly what is wrong with Julia; the answer is: almost everything. Self - hatred and clinical depression primarily, but Julia is also anxious, passive-aggressive, lonely, financially destitute, lazy, narcissistic, morbidly introverted, co - dependent, anemic, and probably suffering from borderline personality disorder. Julia 'can't be alone and can't be too close.' She is also aware and proud of her outsider status; confronting decent younger sister Norah, Julia smugly considers herself the better of the two, the one who has brazenly spit in the face of social convention and middle class morality. Sociopathically, Julia never considers that her rebellion has brought about the almost nihilistic sense of failure and low self - esteem from which she painfully suffers. Rhys, while never less than convincing, hangs so many internal and external albatrosses around Julia's neck that her unhappy existence seems almost fatally determined. Today, Julia would be receiving a maintenance course of serotonin inhibitors.

Feminists took up the Rhys cudgel early; indeed, superficially, Rhys' novels and short stories seem tailor made for the feminist cause. But Rhys' novels are no more primarily about the plight of women than Genet's were about the plight of criminal homosexual men. Rhys cast a wide net in conceiving her fictional worlds; her truths are universal truths that, for better or worse, apply to all. Readers will certainly recognize a kernel of themselves in Rhys' ambivalent, envious, bitter, forlorn, and greedy cast.

After Leaving Mr. MacKenzie ends with Julia enjoying a second Pernod in a Parisian café as twilight falls, a time of day Rhys refers to as "the hour between dog and wolf." Since Julia's life can be said to exist only between these two polarities - between the potentially threatening and the actively harmful - the metaphor is apt. Julia, both a continuous victim and a manipulator, if not an outright abuser, herself, is a creature by nature between dog and wolf. Highly recommended to those who enjoy gripping psychological fiction.

Rhys is best-known for "Wide Sargasso Sea," which is a wonderful book but the least important of her novels. I recommend picking up all four of Rhys' early novels but this is my personal favorite. Rhys is a brilliant writer who can say more in a sentence than many authors can say in a chapter--and she makes you feel more in a word than many authors achieve in a novel.

"Good Morning, Midnight" tells the story of Sasha Jensen in post-war Paris. The author gets inside Sasha's head and exposes to the reader her low sense of self-worth and her misaligned priorities. We get glimpses into Sasha's past to give clues as to what has brought her to this state of depression. Sasha cares too much about what others around her think of her; she is always concious of how she must appear to waiters in cafes, people on the street and workers at the hotel where she is staying. She is always putting thoughts in their head of how they must percieve her. Sasha also does not have her financial priorities straight since she buys a fancy new hat and plans on buying other new items for her wardrobe and in the meantime is neglecting to eat.

I found "Good Morning, Midnight" a fascinating insight into a woman in a "low" psychological state. This book is not recommended if you are looking for an uplifting, feel-good story. "Good Monring, Midnight" would probably lead to great discussion for book groups.

I have a sentence from 'Good Morning Midnight' tattooed on my right arm. There is no higher acolade.

It is no wonder that after the publication of this novel people assumed Jean Rhys had committed suicide. It is a dark, introverted, soul-searching novel. It's brilliance lies in the compassion with which Sasha is treated. This is a woman who is unquestionably at the end of her tether. Life occurs almost unconsciously to her. She drinks non-stop and thinks of fashion before eating. But these aren't superficial choices. They are the few soft whispers of a woman about to go over the brink. Throughout the novel you are given brief glimpses of her past as a shop assistant and the troubles in her marriage. In themselves the troubles which result from them are not ample enough to drive a normal woman to such desperation. You feel that the reason for her state of mind is more the result of a profound neglect of her individual spirit by men. She is led on to believe in a progression of being, but is abandoned to clutch at the ghosts of her old haunts in Paris. This is a sharp contrast to the ideas that we have about artistic scene of Paris in this time period. It is a more sincerely concentrated personal experience than most accounts. It is interesting to think of the end in contrast to the jubilant yeses of Molly Bloom in Ulysses. Sasha's yes is one of doom and resignation to a world that has flown past her.

Despite its depressing character, this novel is a fascinating look at a tendency to sink into a psychological state often ignored. It is also a subtle portrayal of an identity built on a knife's edge. Luckily, Ms Rhys did survive this novel (however unhappily). It is a miracle that she did considering the violent lack of self worth of Sasha; to have imagined such a person must have been terrifying indeed.

This writer ought to be read by a vast audience. Her stories are gripping accounts of lives lived on the edge of sanity or reason. The story "Let Them Call It Jazz" is worth the price alone. Read it and weep.

Despite Rhys' near-constant theme of the "kept" woman who is now too old and paying her dues, she was a fabulous writer with a wonderful way of describing a woman's feelings. Highly recommended to anyone interested in great women writers of the last century.

It could be because I'm male, but I didn't really get into this book. The writing was good but not so incredibly poetic as to interest me on its own. And the characters were uninspiring. I know that it's more realistic to have characters that cannot overcome their problems because most people in real life are like that as well, but I have a hard time dealing with those people so I certainly have little sympathy for a fictional character that is weak and pathetic. I've been told by others that have read this book that I missed the point, and if that's the case I don't mind being educated in my misperceptions but as it stands I can't really recommend this book. However I wouldn't discourage anyone from reading it either.

jean rhys is so brilliant. amazing. read it

Voyage in The Dark was the first Jean Rhys book that I read, and it got me hopelessly addicted. Her voice is honest and compassionate, and truly gives youa bond with the protagonist. It is a book that I have not stopped talking about since I read it.

I liked Wide Sargasso Sea and thought this book had promise (based on the back cover synopsis). That will teach me to fall for the b.c. synopses, which I should have learned by now. I think the story is not at all compelling, but could have been if we'd learned just a bit more about the characters, their motivations, their backgrounds. I found the writing annoying: in reading passages of dialog I was often startled to see that a quotation was what a character was thinking, not saying. These "thought quotations" were mixed in w/ "spoken quotations," making for jumpy reading. A graceless approach to telling a slight but potentially graceful story. I DID like her descriptions of Paris and other French cities. And I was intrigued by her frequent mention of the color red. I might try other books by her, but it's unlikely.

Quartet was Jean Rhys' first novel. It is the story of Marya, a British expatriate living in Paris in the early part of the 20th century. She is acutely self-conscious and yet utterly incapable of changing her life to achieve happiness. Her life revolves around two men: Stephan, her vague Polish husband and HJ, a married British ex-pat who is extremely social and active in the arts. Marya's life has been pared down to essentials: dining, drinking, reading and waiting for her husband to return. When she finds Stephan has been unexpectedly arrested her attachment to him is disturbed. Craving affection and financial security, she desperately attempts to discover why Stephan has been arrested and how she can stay in contact with him. However, she quickly takes up with HJ and his wife, Lois. Her emotions become dangerously tangled between the two. Meandering through defeat after defeat entirely unsatisfied and pining for the money to pay for her rent and a glass of brandy, she ultimately has to face the consequences of her love affair. Marya is vaguely dissatisfied and compulsively tragic. In her life which closely parallels Rhys' own, she finds no remission for the terribly existential fact of life.

In this novel Rhys subtly satirizes her affair with Ford Madox Ford and the life she led with him in Paris. This time of great artistic innovation is reduced to the bare facts of the debased livelihood of the expatriates: their drinking and intertwining sexual affairs. Rhys is unremittingly spare in her emotional honesty. Her prose are hollowed out just as the main character's personality is hollowed out. There is nothing tender about this fictitious recreating. It is brutal, just as Rhys' vision of life. Emotions seep out in sporadic bursts and the rest is contemptuously smoking a cigarette and watching passers by. But the gaze of Marya's is incredibly telling. Her feelings are projected outward onto the people surrounding her. A man or woman witnessed walking by or sitting on the opposite side of a café will inhabit the emotions Marya does not allow to pool inside her. In this way, Rhys fiction is a strong precursor to Alain Robbe-Grillet's because of the intensely violent subjectivity of the character's perception of the world. The solemn nature of novel evokes powerful feelings of sympathy and sorrow.

Why do we accept the horrible people into our social circle? What is fidelity? Why do we fall in love with idiots? These are at the heart of this book as a woman who should know better gets involved with a married man while her husband is in prison. The guy is creepy, boring and stupid but under the guise of "free love" she gives in to an emotional desperation that proves horrid for everyone involved.

This is a beautiful book full of malice and evil just lurking beneath the surface and one of desperation. You will be intrigued and blown away by these stupid awful people. Just a note - DON'T rent or buy the movie. It's Merchant Ivory and it's really Merchant Ivory and this book is so much better than the Merchant-Ivory treatment.

This is a short and sad work by the author of Wide Sargasso Sea that conveys her feelings of leaving her home in the French West Indian colonies only to find disillusionment in Europe.It is, however, a very readable and entertaining book from one of last centuries most neglected authors.

I read this book because it's on the reading list for an English class I was thinking of taking -- I don't think I'll take the class after all!

The main male character in the story is supposed to be Mr. Rochester from "Jane Eyre," and the story centers around his relationship with his first wife, Bertha Mason (in "Wide Sargasso Sea" also named Antoinette Cosway). In "Jane Eyre," Bertha doesn't really figure much and was supposed to have been a madwoman from a long line of hereditary schizophrenics and idiots. But in "Wide Sargasso Sea" Bertha/Antoinette is really a nice, healthy, poor little rich girl, and it is Rochester's unkind, unsympathetic, hot-and-cold English ways that make her go crazy. An important idea in "Wide Sargasso Sea," in fact the premise that Jean Rhys sets out to prove, is that the portrayal of Rochester in "Jane Eyre" was a whitewash, and that he was really not a nice guy at all.

I really wanted to take this class so I worked hard at keeping my mind open, but I've gotten to page 160 and can't go on anymore. If this is Mr. Rochester, I'm Tom Wolfe.

In "Wide Sargasso Sea," for instance, Rochester is fully aware that he is marrying for money and he deliberately lies to Bertha/Antoinette, telling her he loves her. This Rochester is also a miser. He is sexually predacious and sleeps with one of the servants where Bertha/Antoinette can hear them in an (unforeshadowed and unexplained) attempt to use sex to mess with Bertha's/Antoinette's mind.

All right, that's not at all the Rochester in "Jane Eyre," but let's make allowances because he is 20 years younger at the time of "Wide Sargasso Sea" -- let's suppose that in "Jane Eyre," with age, he has become more honest, more sober, more generous. But he is prudent and refrains from telling Jane this version of earlier events. (Highly unlikely since he told her other unflattering things about himself, but vaguely possible -- let's close one eye and keep reading.)

But as we read on we stumble upon lots of other collateral evidence that Rhys' Rochester is really not Rochester, in fact is no man at all. For example: Mr. Rochester talks not as he does in "Jane Eyre," expressively and refinedly, in long, complex sentences with a poet's range of vocabulary, but almost exactly the same way that the other characters in Wide Sargasso Sea talk -- in often lyrical, but choppy and incomplete sentences. And sometimes he's downright awkward: for instance, on P. 69, Mr. Rochester looks at the countryside around him in wonder. " 'What an extreme green,' was all I could say," he tells us. Ouch.

Okay, in "Jane Eyre" it wasn't really Mr. Rochester who was talking, it was Jane telling us what Mr. Rochester said, so maybe it was Jane's eloquence, not his. But as the story progesses, he gets more and more un-Rochesterlike and the world of the book less and less early 19th century. Rochester and Antoinette hang out at her house all day for weeks on end: no local English gentry, travellers, or missionaries visit them; Rochester never goes out for long, brisk, English walks or, better yet, horseback rides; he doesn't think of work or any sort of industry at all. Even if he is supposedly getting over a fever, this is simply not English behavior.

Towards the end, in fact, Rochester's voice and character is completely indistinguishable from Bertha/Antoinette's. On page 149, the housekeeper is scolding him and he says, "I couldn't bear any more and again I went out of the room..." And in the next paragraph: "...it seemed to me that everything round me was hostile. The telescope drew away and said don't touch me." (Ooh, that hurts, all right.)

On p. 154 we learn why Rhys needed to rename Bertha "Antoinette" (besides the fact that Bertha didn't sound pretty to her 20th century ears) when Rochester admits that he, in a Freudian slip, started calling her Marionette -- this as proof of his wily "Gaslight"-type intention to psychologically destroy her. (Wow! Proof that, even in those days, men were just like they are now! Primo deconstruction, Rhys!) Rochester admits this, by the way, in the middle of a long tete-a-tete with Bertha/Antoinette's black servant, whom for some (again unforeshadowed and unexplained) reason he suddenly starts treating as an equal, even an intimate, where before he had logically held himself aloof from the servants. He even, on page 158, asks her opinion on how much money he should have to settle on Bertha if he left her! (That's when I had to leave!)

I've given the book two stars because Rhys writes well and often prettily. But she's simply not versatile enough, in voice or in psychology, to take on such a task as she has here.

'Jane Eyre' was one of my favorite books when I was a teenager and if I had read 'Wide Sargasso Sea' right after reading 'Jane Eyre', I would have hated it for deconstructing the heroic image of Mr. Rochester. I'm glad I discovered WSS much later. It's an intriguing, fascinating study of Mr. Rochester and his first wife, Antoinette Mason, the prototype of the 'mad wife in the attic' who played a minor but vital part in 'Jane Eyre'. Antoinette's mother descends into madness following the loss of the family estate to a slave rebellion. To shore up the family fortune and save her from becoming an old maid, and thus a burden, she is married off to Mr. Rochester, newly arrived from England, who knows nothing about her mother's insanity. WSS shows us the other side of Mr. Rochester that Jane Eyre couldn't or wouldn't see: his coldness, his selfishness, and his opportunism. We can understand how, as he did in 'Jane Eyre', such a man would lie to an innocent young woman about his marital status and nearly trap her into unwittingly participating in a sham marriage. Rochester is attracted to Antoinette at first; he is dazzled by her beauty as well as her money and eager to marry her. Once the honeymoon phase is over, he is unable to adjust to his surroundings. Jamaica is antipathetic to everything he grew up with, it's wild, untamed, a study in extremes, anathema to a tidy, organized, narrow-minded European, and Rochester is the typical insular-minded Englishman who despises what he is unable to understand. Antoinette is totally a product of her surroundings and completely at home where she is, and as Rochester feels alienated from Jamaica, so he feels alientated from his wife, and the discovery of her mother's insanity is justification enough for his deepening antipathy for her. He can't accept who or what she is; he can't even accept her name, he insists on calling her 'Bertha', never mind that it's a name she hates, it's what he wants, so it's who she will be. In 'Jane Eyre', Rochester blames his wife's alcoholism for the failure of the marriage; in WSS, it's his brutally cold and insensitive treatment of her that finally drives her to drink. When he takes her away from Jamaica and everything she knows and loves, she retreats into a madness even deeper than her mother's; she can't live in his world, any more than he can live in hers. In 'Jane Eyre' Rochester is the romantic hero and in WSS he is a monster of selfishness; when both are put together, the real complexity of the character finally emerges.

Jean Rhys, the troubled author who was far ahead of her time in the 1920's, felt a strange kinship with Antoinette or Bertha Mason, the madwoman locked in the attic in Bronte's "Jane Eyre." From the first time Rhys read "Jane Eyre" she knew she would someday write her story because she felt she'd lived it.

Like Antoinette, Rhys grew up in the Caribbean, a troubled and hermetic world of Creoles, colonists and former slaves. Antoinette is truly a loner--the reversal of family fortunes causes her to be rejected by her own people, and despised by those who previously were on a lower rung of society. Throughout the novel, Antoinette is used, buffeted and never in charge of her own life. She feels that, as a woman, she is an object, not a person. As a woman, she is not in charge of her ultimate destiny, and this provides the conflict for the novel. Her madness is only an extension of this isolation and rejection.

What makes Rhys a masterful novelist is her use of conversation and immediate events to describe the world in which Antoinette lives. There are no long passages of exposition; we see the world only through the eyes of the characters, mostly at the same time that they experience it. However, the immediate events and conversation or narration are so cleverly constructed that the reader sees through the narrator's eyes and can really see and feel the surroundings. This intimate point of view puts the reader in the skin of the character, but can be a bit confusing because we cannot always rely on the veracity of the narration. The point of view itself switches in the novel from first person to third person, in the second part, and back to first in the third and final portion, where Antoinette is locked in the attic.

The novel is in no way a re-write or version of "Jane Eyre." In "Jane Eyre", the madwoman is not really a character--she's a symbol for evil, for carnal and worldly desires yielded to without regard for the soul. "Wide Sargasso Sea" develops the madwoman into a character. Rhys slyly copies the beautiful symmetry of "Jane Eyre", where events occur in a sort of repetition; in "Jane Eyre", the heroine must leave a hostile home and find a haven, which then becomes hostile because it fails to nourish her soul with love (Gateshead, Lowood, Thornfield and then Marsh House. Only when Jane can marry her Mr. Rochester on HER terms, does she find a true home.) In "Wide Sargasso Sea", Antoinette's home burns twice, a similar use of symbolism, here representing rejection by the world.

"Wide Sargasso Sea" is often listed as a "must-read" book --it certainly is a unique book and was far ahead of its time when Rhys wrote it. It's really worth reading.