In Maupassant's story, what is fort comme la mort, strong as death, is love. In Rhys’ story, it is hate. The memory of being hated and rejected as a child and the impossible desire to be accepted as a friend by the Dominican blacks always remained with Rhys, fictionalized most powerfully in the relationship between Antoinette and Tia in Wide Sargasso Sea. Yet hatred and its power to damage and maim are also central themes in Rhys’ continental novels: in those as well, hate is the outcome of a politics of oppression, demarcation and fear.

Helen Tiffin, writing on Jean Rhys, suggests that ‘the white Creole is, as a double outsider, condemned to self-consciousness, a sense of inescapable difference and even deformity in the two societies by whose judgements she always condemns herself ’. Such internalization of rejection and hostility, she points out, is charted by Rhys in both her Caribbean and her continental fiction. Good Morning, Midnight is a city story, not an island story, a story of the metropolitan centre rather than the colonial periphery, of the beginnings of middle-age rather than the end of childhood. Yet its account of how subjectivity is formed and deformed through exclusion, prejudice, marginality and hatred has ultimately much in common with ‘The Day They Burned the Books’.

Sasha Jensen, the narrator and central character of Good Morning, Midnight, is part of society's flotsam, an outsider, impecunious, a woman of fading looks and uncertain reputation, condemned, like the Creole, to self-consciousness of difference and deformity by the judgements of those around her:

Sasha has lived in London for five years, where she has ‘twopound- ten a week and a room […] off the Gray's Inn Road’.