Review: Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier

From the back of the book (for those few, who like me, had been oblivious to this book until recently): "Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again." So the second Mrs. Maxim de Winter remembered the chilling events that led her down the turning drive past the beeches, white and naked, to the isolated gray stone manse on the windswept Cornish coast. With a husband she barely knew, the young bride arrived at the immense estate, only to be inexorably drawn into the life of the first Mrs. de Winter, the beautiful Rebecca, dead but never forgotten…her suite of rooms never touched, her clothes ready to be worn, her servant – the sinister Mrs. Danvers – still loyal. And as an eerie presentiment of evil tightened around her heart, the second Mrs. de Winter began her search for the real fate of Rebecca…for the secrets of Manderley.

Before reading numerous glowing reviews on a variety of blogs, I had never heard of this book. Shocking! In discussing it with a co-worker who just happened to be reading it too, she compared it to a soap opera in the form of a classic novel. I finally started reading my bookmooched copy during Memorial Day weekend. I loved it as much as all the reviewers said they did!

I believe what captured me from early on was the development of the narrator. (How observant I am to just have realized we never learn her first name.) The reader really gets to know her, as we are privy to her innermost thoughts. And, despite being published in 1938, the inner world of our narrator illustrates enduring themes of the human tradition – love, insecurity, maturing from adolescence to adulthood, and self-perception. In addition, the narrator’s internal processing of certain events mirrored mine in an uncanny way. The first time I noticed this was as the narrator was preparing to leave Monte Carlo (early in the book):

"Packing up. The nagging worry of departure….I am aware of sadness, of a sense of loss. Here, I say, we have lived, we have been happy. This has been ours, however brief the time. Though two nights only have been spent beneath a roof, yet we leave something of ourselves behind. Nothing material, not a hair-pin on a dressing-table, not an empty bottle of aspirin tablets, not a handkerchief beneath a pillow, but something indefinable, a moment of our lives, a thought, a mood."

And I always thought I had a uniquely sentimental view of good-byes.

I look forward to reading more of Daphne du Maurier’s work in the future.