Three Guineas is concerned with those within the bourgeois bastions of patriarchal society. Rhys deals with its outcasts. Woolf writes about those ‘daughters of educated men’ who have remained ‘shut up’ in the patriarchal home, Rhys about the daughters of educated men who have gone to the bad. Sasha has ‘extremely respectable’ relations, Marya comes from ‘presentable people’, but they have both slipped into a social limbo, reached all the more rapidly because they have always lacked money. What their alternative might have been is vividly illustrated in After Leaving Mr Mackenzie by Julia's ‘good’ sister Norah, who looks after her sick mother in a second-floor flat in Acton, and is …

‘The huge machine of law, order and respectability’, to use the phrase from ‘Vienne’, may be on Norah's side, but it is crushing her just as effectively as if she were, like Julia, defying it. ‘Beasts and devils’, Norah thinks, just for a minute, before sinking back into despairing conformity. Norah is one of the women whom Rhys shows policing the borders of respectable society, but she makes it clear that, as so often, the police themselves may be recruited from an oppressed class.

Good Morning, Midnight deals with those who have something very powerful fighting, not on their side, but against them: ‘organized society’ whether expressed as economic exploitation, anti-Semitism, racism or sexual prejudice.