Good Morning, Midnight

The title of Lily Brooks-Dalton’s Good Morning, Midnight is taken from the 1939 Jean Rhys novel of the same name. Brooks-Dalton’s epigraph, “I heave myself out of the darkness slowly, painfully. And there I am, and there he is,” also comes from Rhys’s novel (Rhys, Jean. Good Morning, Midnight. W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 2020). Of this allusion and her inspiration, Brooks-Dalton says that the 1939 novel influenced her exploration of Human and Environmental Connection: “Rhys’s novel digs into isolation and connection in such important and artful ways, which are the bedrock of the story I wanted to tell also. […] I think it was the gut-wrenching way that Rhys writes about loneliness that really caught hold of me” (Brooks-Dalton, Lily. Interview with Sara Cutaia. “‘Good Morning, Midnight’ Imagines the World Gone Dark.” Chicago Review of Books, 17 Aug. 2016).

Rhys, a British novelist who spent her childhood in Dominica, is particularly known for her novels Voyage in the Dark (1934) and Wide Sargasso Sea (1996), the latter of which chronicles Rhys’s interpretation of the life of Bertha Mason (or Antoinette Cosway, in Rhys’s telling)—the “mad” wife of Rochester in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre.