Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier
Described as the Unsurpassed Modern Masterpiece of Romantic Suspense
Rebecca was the fifth novel by the wildly popular novelist Daphne du Maurier. It was published shortly after her novel Jamaica Inn, in which du Maurier begins to lay claim to her niche as skilled craftsman of romantic suspense novels. The novel is completely captivating, hard to put aside, and slides down as easily as an oyster. The nearly four-hundred pages are not an issue for any but the most apathetic of readers.
Original Reviews and the Test of Time
First published in 1938, it received good reviews although the reviewer, Basil Davenport, did concede that it was melodramatic and tended to exaggerate emotional values in order to achieve a desired effect. Yet he was willing to say that it was “as absorbing a tale as the season is likely to bring.” Rebecca has stood the test of time and du Maurier has a huge fan club with her own fan site on the web that has more than 30,000 visitors a month.
Captivating
Captivating is perhaps the best one-word description for the book. It opens with one of the most well-known lines in fiction “Last night I dreamed I went to Manderley again.” It ends with ashes and salt. In between, the reader follows the narrator into Maxim de Winter’s second marriage. A marriage that is inextricably hooked into the line of his first marriage and is sinking quickly. The narrator struggles to understand her situation and to learn all she can about Max’s first marriage and his dead wife Rebecca.
While the narrator struggles to untangle the web around Rebecca’s life and death, she makes observations about the nature of reality and perception. “This moment was safe though, this could not be touched. Here we sat together, Maxim and I, hand-in-hand, and the past and the future mattered not at all. This was secure, this funny little fragment of time he would never remember, never think about again…For them it was just after lunch, quarter-past-three on a haphazard afternoon, like any hour, like any day. They did not want to hold it close, imprisoned and secure, as I did. They were not afraid.” (102)
Yet it is not until nearly all secrets have been revealed that she recognizes the futility of perception “This was what I had done. I had built up false pictures in my mind and sat before them. I had never had the courage to demand the truth.” (276)
Du Maurier creates a fascinating web of perceptions that are only untangled when Maxim tells his young bride the whole truth. Once the truth is revealed, the threads of perception begin to fall into their place and the truth about Rebecca who sits at the center of the web can be fully understood.
du Maurier, Daphne. Rebecca. Harper Collins Publishers, 1971. ISBN 0-380-7855-6
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