‘There is always the other side, always’: Katherine Mansfield’s and Jean Rhys’s Travellers in Europe

Abstract

The quotation in the title is taken from Jean Rhys’s best-known novel Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), but I want to apply it to her much earlier novel set in Paris, Good Morning, Midnight (1939). My comparison of the novel with two of Mansfield’s stories set in Europe, ‘An Indiscreet Journey’ (written in 1915, first published in 1924), and ‘Miss Brill’ (1920), does not claim that Rhys was influenced by Mansfield but rather suggests correspondences between them as colonial modernists, Mansfield from New Zealand and Rhys from Dominica in the Caribbean. Mansfield, as we know, felt in Britain that she was a ‘little colonial walking in the London garden patch — allowed to look, perhaps, but not to linger’.¹ Similarly, Jean Rhys was made to feel out of place in Britain. She reports that an actor who was to give a public reading from Good Morning, Midnight said when she met her:

‘Dear Miss Rhys — You’re so gentle and quiet – Not at all what I expected!’ — I gathered afterwards that she expected a raving and not too clean maniac with straws in gruesome unwashed hair. Maybe I should have played it that way. Never disappoint your audience.²