Good Morning, Midnight

New York: Harper & Row. Very Good+ in Very Good+ dj. [1970]. 1st U.S. edition. Hardcover. [good sound copy, modest wear to cloth at spine ends, slight fading to cloth along top edges of covers, the teensiest bit of wear to corners; the jacket is nice and clean, with a touch of surface weawr and a vertical creas in the front flap]. The first American publication of Rhys's experimental modernist reverie about an Englishwoman haunted by her past on a visit to Paris. The author's fourth novel, it was such a resounding failure on its original publication in 1939 that she stopped writing and more or less dropped off the literary map for nearly two decades. The first spark of a "rediscovery" began in 1949, when actress/writer Selma Vaz Dias adapted the book for the stage, and flowered more fully eight years later, when the BBC broadcast a radio adaptation (also by Vaz Dias). It was Rhys's 1966 novel "Wide Sargasso Sea," however, that brought her fully back into the spotlight; it was a great critical and popular success, and is now considered her best (and best-known) book. The present edition was, I believe, the first of her earlier novels to be reprinted in the United States; it was preceded by a 1967 British edition, published by Andre Deutsch. .