In 1936, the year before Rhys paid the visit to Paris on which she began Good Morning, Midnight, she had returned for two months to Dominica with her second husband Leslie Tilden Smith. It was a significant and highly charged return, and she was to spend the next thirty years working out its implications in fictional form. The Caribbean had, as I have stressed, always been a significant presence in her fiction. Andrew Thacker suggests that, in reading Rhys, it is important not simply ‘to focus upon one of the two geographies in her work: either the metropolitan centres of Paris, London and Vienna, or the Caribbean influences upon her fiction’; rather, he believes, ‘a fuller understanding of her fiction must examine how her texts voyage between these two geographies, capturing the shifting shapes of her own prose journeys’. He goes on to illustrate this through the 1934 novel, Voyage in the Dark, in which past and present, Dominica and London, intermingle more overtly than in any other Rhys text. Yet that both ‘geographies’ are always in some ways present is true of all her novels, even in the ‘continental’ ones whose heroines have no overt link to the Caribbean. Alec Waugh, Evelyn Waugh's travel writer brother, was one of the first to comment on this. He had met Rhys in England, and mentioned her in passing in an article that he wrote on Dominica in 1948. This was when her reputation was at its lowest, and he makes it clear he does not expect many of his readers to have heard of her: ‘Her novels have not reached a large public,’ he writes somewhat apologetically, ‘but they have a personal flavour.’ He then goes on to say; ‘Rereading After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie, I could see how many flashbacks to Dominica – imperceptible to the unacquainted reader – occurred in it. I could see how Dominica had coloured her temperament and outlook.’ Both After Leaving Mr Mackenzie and Voyage in the Dark had appeared before that return home, and, as Peter Hulme has argued, after the 1936 visit Rhys’ Caribbean past assumes a different and more complex importance in her fiction.