This might be the novel I've read more times than any other (neck and neck with Pride and Prejudice). And yet, even knowing every twist by heart, the grip it has on me never loosens. I still tear through the pages. The suffocation is still there. Welcome to Manderley.
It starts like a cheap romance: some bland, mousy girl meets a wealthy, handsome Englishman on the French Riviera. She's a companion to a rich American woman. He's the owner of a massive Cornwall estate, recently widowed and supposedly inconsolable. He takes her on drives for two weeks, then proposes marriage on what looks like impulse. Despite their age gap and class difference, she says yes because she's head over heels. The second she arrives at Manderley, reality hits—nothing will be as easy as her daydreams.
"The gates had closed behind us with a crack, the dusty main road had vanished, and I realized this wasn't the driveway I'd imagined when thinking of Manderley. Not some wide gravel avenue with neat flowerbeds on each side, swept clean and raked smooth. The drive twisted like a snake, barely wider than a footpath in places, and a tall colonnade of trees rose above our heads, their gnarled branches intertwining, forming a vault like a cathedral entrance."
A secretive husband who refuses to talk about the past. Her own lack of confidence. An overactive imagination. Everything conspires to make this young woman uncomfortable. And above all, the ghost of the first wife forces herself into every corner. Rebecca is in the rhododendrons in the garden. Rebecca is in the trinkets in the small sitting room. Rebecca is in a handkerchief forgotten in a coat pocket. Rebecca is on everyone's lips. And Rebecca is beautiful, intelligent, accomplished, generous, beloved by all—especially her husband. This myth is religiously maintained by the unsettling Mrs. Danvers, the housekeeper, a cold, authoritarian woman who doesn't appreciate an intruder taking Madame de Winter's place.
There are two novels here. In the first, not much happens. It's all atmosphere, unspoken words, the anxiety that grips the too-impressionable young bride day after day—convinced of her own dullness, her insignificance, her inability to be loved by her husband. The tension builds in an oppressive crescendo until the plot twist transforms it into a thriller.
Daphné du Maurier perfectly shows that what hurts us most isn't the facts themselves, but the fantasies we build around them. The innocent reader thinks, "How could such a man marry such a woman?" But the reader in the know understands that Maxim de Winter couldn't have married anyone else. They suffer all the more watching the new wife struggle through a maze of secrets and false appearances.
With Rebecca's character, du Maurier dismantles the myth of the angelic beauty who is all goodness and love. When the mask falls, all that remains is lies and hypocrisy. What was love becomes hate. What was pure becomes toxic. What was luminous becomes rot. Under these conditions, where is good and where is evil? That's the real stakes of the novel's second half.
I love everything about this book. This timid, awkward anti-heroine. This improbable love story. This massive house full of corners and ghosts. Rebecca herself—a character we never see but who occupies all the space. And above all, Daphné du Maurier's writing, which drags us into a whirlwind of dread that doesn't stop at the final page.
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Translated from English by Denise Van Moppès. Le Livre de poche, 1971 (1st ed. 1939). 377 p.