SOURCE: Green, David D. “Beckett's Dream: More Niente than Bel.” Journal of Beckett Studies 5, nos. 1-2 (autumn-winter 1995-96): 67-80.

In the following essay, Green presents Dream of Fair to Middling Women as a critique of the novel form.

Written in the summer of 1932, Dream of Fair to Middling Women entered the world inauspiciously as a hastily produced work by a young Irish poet and translator living in the Trianon Hotel in Paris. For thirty years the novel, unpublished and unnoticed, languished as a quarry for more successful endeavors. During the next thirty it became accessible to the curious in the libraries of Dartmouth College and Reading University, and as a consequence, received occasional attention in critical studies. In recent years, however, it has appeared in prominent stacks on the display tables of bookstores in suburban shopping malls, where it has more likely bewildered than delighted the unsuspecting customer...