Brett Ashley and Sasha Jensen: Lost Women of a Lost Generation.
This distinction between the 1920s and the 1930s may be seen in the novels The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway, and Good Morning, Midnight by Jean Rhys. Both novels prominently feature women who live frivolously from day to day, desperately attempting to "buy" their happiness; or, at least, to buy the alcohol with which they may buy "forgetfulness" of their traumatic pasts. Indeed, in many respects the character of Sasha Jensen from Good Morning, Midnight may be seen as an older version of Brett Ashley from The Sun Also Rises. While in the Hemingway novel, first published in 1926 at the height of the Jazz Age, displays the figure of Brett as an elegantly wasted English Lady, the figure of Sasha Jensen, from Rhys' 1939 novel, displays the physical and spiritual costs of this life of dissipation carried on for over a decade. Read as such, these two female characters serve as cultural "bookends" or markers to the long intermission between the wars. 5 pgs. 8 f/c. 2b.
