[Jean Rhys's] heroines may be called Anna Morgan, Julia Martin, Marya Zelli, Sasha Jensen, but they are always Jean Rhys…. They are victims, of whom it would be beside the point to say that they are passive, acquiesce in their victimization, for, despite their ability to walk the boulevards of Paris and to buy an occasional hat, they are prisoners, and a novel like Good Morning, Midnight, in its claustrophobia, in its dispassionate recording of its protagonist's efforts to keep alive through another day, brings to mind Dostoevsky or Solzhenitsyn…. I suspect that readers, particularly women, respond so strongly to Rhys's novels because they express indelibly one aspect of the female condition—the limitation, the dependence, the despair. There is nothing exhilarating about these novels except the art with which they are made, the art which was in fact, in Rhys's life, the only triumphant response to a dreary record of experience. (p. 597)
I do not mean to imply that these novels slavishly follow the events of Rhys's life, or that they record all there is to tell about that life. She was an artist with a rigorous sense of what the shape of her novel demanded, praised quite correctly by [Ford Madox] Ford…. (p. 598)
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