Husband and wife have been condemned to the hell of expatriation, in a hot, shadowless, unnamed country, staying like criminals in an anonymous hotel. It ends with Manderley in flames, but the first two chapters are also the conclusion.

It’s a grim reworking of “Bluebeard ”, in which the murderer is suddenly the victim, adorable despite his bloody hands.īut who is really punished, and for what? Rebecca has a disturbingly circular structure, a closed loop like James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake. She’s destroyed because of her poisonous sexuality, what the Daily Mail might euphemistically call her “lifestyle”.Īmazingly, the reader is somehow manipulated or cajoled into believing her murder and its concealment are somehow necessary, even romantic that being cuckolded is a far worse fate than a woman’s death. She is an animal, a devil, a snake, “vicious, damnable, rotten through and through”. In the Du Maurier family slang a sexually attractive person was a “menace”, and Rebecca unites both the word’s meanings. Of course, this paragon of beauty and kindness turns out to be a malevolent fake.

Photograph: Movie Poster Image Art/Getty Images It was Rebecca who created Manderley, turning the lovely old house into the apotheosis of feminine talents and virtues.Ĭrime and high camp … the poster for Alfred Hitchcock’s 1940 film adaptation of Du Maurier’s thriller. Rebecca, on the other hand, is finished: lacquered and exquisite as the priceless china cupid her clumsy replacement breaks. The narrator is raw as an egg, practically a schoolgirl, with her “lanky” hair and bitten nails, her inability to talk to servants or run a house. “One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman,” Simone de Beauvoir said, and there aren’t many darker illustrations of what this might mean and what it might cost than Rebecca. The effect is curiously unstable, not so much a story as a network of possibilities, in which the reader is rapidly entangled. Whole pages go by devoted to her imaginings and speculations. The second Mrs de Winter might not excel at much, but she is among the great dreamers of English literature. There are two sunken ships, a murder, a fire, a costume party and multiple complex betrayals, and yet it’s startling to realise how much of its drama never actually happens.

It’s a melodrama, and by no means short on bangs and crashes. The girl is anxious, observant, dreamy, terribly romantic, a perennial fantasist whose fears and insecurities bloom out of control when she becomes mistress of the haunting Manderley. She wrote it in the first person, from the perspective of a young unnamed narrator, who meets the dashing, yet unhappy Max de Winter while working as a lady’s companion in a grand hotel in Monte Carlo. Inchingly, Daphne du Maurier’s difficult novel came together.

Rebecca by daphne du maurier