
Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier is a gothic mystery novel that revolves around the second Mrs. de Winter, who marries the wealthy widower Maxim de Winter and moves to his grand estate, Manderley. The shadow of Maxim's late wife, Rebecca, looms large over the household, with the housekeeper Mrs. Danvers and other characters adding to the mysterious and suspenseful atmosphere. The story is filled with plot twists, dark secrets, and a haunting sense of doom that keeps readers engaged until the shocking ending.
Genres:
Tropes/Plot Devices:
Topics:
Notes:
Sensitive Topics/Content Warnings
Content warnings include themes of emotional abuse, suicide, murder, and mental illness.
Has Romance?
The romance element in Rebecca is significant but is overshadowed by themes of jealousy, identity struggles, and emotional manipulation.
From The Publisher:
Now a Netflix film starring Lily James and Kristin Scott Thomas
"Last Night I Dreamt I went to Manderley Again..."
With these words, the reader is ushered into an isolated gray stone mansion on the windswept Cornish coast, as the second Mrs. Maxim de Winter recalls the chilling events that transpired as she began her new life as the young bride of a husband she barely knew. For in every corner of every room were phantoms of a time dead but not forgotten-a past devotedly preserved by the sinister housekeeper, Mrs. Danvers: a suite immaculate and untouched, clothing laid out and ready to be worn, but not by any of the great house's current occupants. With an eerie presentiment of evil tightening her heart, the second Mrs. de Winter walked in the shadow of her mysterious predecessor, determined to uncover the darkest secrets and shattering truths about Maxim's first wife-the late and hauntingly beautiful Rebecca.
A PBS Great American Read Top 100 Pick
Ratings (337)
Incredible (83) | |
Loved It (141) | |
Liked It (70) | |
It Was OK (28) | |
Did Not Like (12) | |
Hated It (3) |
Reader Stats (695):
Read It (345) | |
Currently Reading (2) | |
Want To Read (274) | |
Did Not Finish (12) | |
Not Interested (62) |
9 comment(s)
I really loved the writing as parts were just so beautifully described but the actual story frustrated me and I found a lot of it unbelievably ridiculous. It was worth reading those for the prose alone.
4.5*
Historic fiction.
Mysterious Manderley.
Rebecca is the name of the personality in this book, which constantly assaults our heroin (whose name we dont know). Our heroin is a young girl who meets a widower Max de Winter on a holiday and marries him. Max de Winter who was married to Rebecca also is haunted by the memories of his late wife which in turn effects our heroin who is young and new to a world like Manderley.
I think this book is so clever! The tension and suspense throughout the book is incredible, when it is all psychological mind games, and nothing actually threatening happening! Basically, this book is a tale of how women have no power and no identity in this society! It took me awhile to realize that we never even know the NAME of our narrator. She is of so little importance or worth in this British society, that she is not even worthy of a name! She becomes simply the second Mrs. Maxim de Winters. She lucked out, because she literally had no prospects or ability to move ahead in life other than waiting on other rich people. The title character Rebecca, also has little prospects in this society, but she doesn't care, and she takes her power back anyway! Her only power is her beauty (i.e. sex appeal) and she uses that as a weapon to do exactly how she pleases and get whatever she can out of this world before she leaves it. She is criticized, but I found her to be great. Unfortunately, as all "bad" women go (i.e. women who are flouting society's rules and ignoring their supposed role and place), she must be severely punished. Even in her death though, she continues to haunt everyone. The narrator with no identity remains a child, weak and subservient to her husband, the larger society, and the house throughout. The mind games that the head maid (again a supposedly powerless person in this world due to her economic role) plays is cruel and downright diabolical. I honestly do not understand the power that these lords of the manor held, nor why everyone just waits on them head and foot, and what they are so "busy" doing or why they are so important, but I honestly enjoyed how the powerless schemed and manipulated to try to get a slight bit of autonomy back in this book. Social commentary mixed up with a very entertaining Gothic mystery equals the rare 5-star book for me! I want to read more by Daphne du Maurier!
Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again.
2022 reread:
Rebecca is my all-time favorite novel and was just as amazing the second time around. I picked up on so much more this time around: how the narrator constantly compares her relationship with her husband to that of a master and his dog (yikes), how closely Rebecca herself is associated with the color red and the rhododendrons specifically (and with the sea—also, perhaps the narrator is associated with the color blue?), how much Rebecca's memory really does permeate Manderley, how much time the narrator spends in her imagination (either envisioning the best about Rebecca and Max's relationship, or the worst about what other people must be thinking of her, or the future she wants for herself, both tangibly and in terms of personal growth), and how Maxim's entire motivation for everything that happened with Rebecca was (ironically) to preserve his ancestral home of Manderley.
I am still disappointed with the final third—but mostly with the narrator, and not with du Maurier. The choices the narrator makes are the only ones that make sense for her character, much as I wish that were not true. However, I do think the final third is the weakest part of the novel. The narrator's personality shift is disconcerting and perhaps too rushed. Similarly, du Maurier seems to forget to bring her thoughts onto the page: entire chapters pass (such as the conversation between Maxim, Favell, and Colonel Julyan) with hardly a mention of the narrator, and while that passiveness makes sense, previously the narrator was still very present through her internal monologue—yet that largely disappears.
Altogether an incredible novel and fascinating character study with the most beautiful prose I've ever read.
Some favorite passages:
Nature had come into her own again and, little by little, in her stealthy, insidious way had encroached upon the drive with long, tenacious fingers. The woods, always a menace even in the past, had triumphed in the end.
The rhododendrons stood fifty feet high, twisted and entwined with bracken, and they had entered into alien marriage with a host of nameless shrubs, poor, bastard things that clung about their roots as though conscious of their spurious origin.
I left the drive and went onto the terrace, for the nettles were no barrier to me, a dreamer. I walked enchanted, and nothing held me back.
We can never go back again, that much is certain. The past is still too close to us.
Happiness is not a possession to be prized, it is a quality of thought, a state of mind.
That corner in the drive, too, where the trees encroach upon the gravel, is not a place in which to pause, not after the sun has set. When the leaves rustle, they sound very much like the stealthy movement of a woman in evening dress, and when they shiver suddenly, and fall, and scatter away along the ground, they might be the patter, patter, of a woman’s hurrying footstep, and the mark in the gravel the imprint of a high-heeled satin shoe.
How young and inexperienced I must have seemed, and how I felt it, too. One was too sensitive, too raw, there were thorns and pinpricks in so many words that in reality fell lightly on the air.
I wished I was older, different.
There was something rather blowzy about roses in full bloom, something shallow and raucous, like women with untidy hair. In the house they became mysterious and subtle.
I am glad it cannot happen twice, the fever of first love. For it is a fever, and a burden, too, whatever the poets may say. They are not brave, the days when we are twenty-one. They are full of little cowardices, little fears without foundation, and one is so easily bruised, so swiftly wounded, one falls to the first barbed word. Today, wrapped in the complacent armor of approaching middle age, the infinitesimal pricks of day by day brush one lightly and are soon forgotten, but then—how a careless word would linger, becoming a fiery stigma, and how a look, a glance over a shoulder, branded themselves as things eternal.
Already she belonged to the past, she was only a memory. […] There was something chilling in the thought, something a little melancholy, and looking at the clock I saw that five more minutes had gone by.
“If only there could be an invention,” I said impulsively, “that bottled up a memory, like scent. And it never faded, and it never got stale. And then, when one wanted it, the bottle could be uncorked, and it would be like living the moment all over again.” I looked up at him, to see what he would say.
What degradation lay in being young, I thought, and fell to tearing my nails. “I wish,” I said savagely, still mindful of his laugh and throwing discretion to the wind, “I wish I was a woman of about thirty-six dressed in black satin with a string of pearls.”
I thought of all those heroines of fiction who looked pretty when they cried, and what a contrast I must make with blotched and swollen face, and red rims to my eyes.
Today we pass on, we see it no more, and we are different, changed in some infinitesimal way.
In love. He had not said anything yet about being in love. No time perhaps. It was all so hurried at the breakfast table. Marmalade, and coffee, and that tangerine. No time. The tangerine was very bitter. No, he had not said anything about being in love. Just that we would be married. Short and definite, very original. Original proposals were much better. More genuine. Not like other people. Not like younger men who talked nonsense probably, not meaning half they said. Not like younger men being very incoherent, very passionate, swearing impossibilities. Not like him the first time, asking Rebecca…
Even now the ink stood up on the fragments thick and black, the writing was not destroyed. I took a box of matches and set fire to the fragments. The flame had a lovely light, staining the paper, curling the edges, making the slanting writing impossible to distinguish. The fragments fluttered to gray ashes. The letter R was the last to go, it twisted in the flame, it curled outwards for a moment, becoming larger than ever. Then it crumpled too; the flame destroyed it.
The past would not exist for either of us; we were starting afresh, he and I. The past had blown away like the ashes in the wastepaper basket.
It seemed remote to me, and far too distant, the time when I too should smile and be at ease, and I wished it could come quickly; that I could be old even, with gray hair and slow of step, having lived here many years—anything but the timid, foolish creature I felt myself to be.
Someone advanced from the sea of faces, someone tall and gaunt, dressed in deep black, whose prominent cheek-bones and great, hollow eyes gave her a skull’s face, parchment-white, set on a skeleton’s frame.
for even now, because of the high wind, there was a mist upon the window-glass, as though someone had breathed upon it. A mist salt-laden, borne upwards from the sea. A hurrying cloud hid the sun for a moment as I watched, and the sea changed color instantly, becoming black, and the white crests with them very pitiless suddenly, and cruel, not the gay sparkling sea I had looked on first.
I should think you are a placid little thing.” She smiled, and pinched my arm, and I thought about being placid, how quiet and comfortable it sounded, someone with knitting on her lap, with calm unruffled brow. Someone who was never anxious, never tortured by doubt and indecision, someone who never stood as I did, hopeful, eager, frightened, tearing at bitten nails, uncertain which way to go, what star to follow.
the rain and the rivulet mingled with one another, and the liquid note of the black bird fell upon the damp air in harmony with them both. I brushed the dripping heads of azaleas as I passed, so close they grew together, bordering the path. Little drops of water fell onto my hands from the soaked petals. There were petals at my feet too, brown and sodden, bearing their scent upon them still, and a richer, older scent as well, the smell of deep moss and bitter earth, the stems of bracken, and the twisted buried roots of trees.
That rusted grate knew no fire, this dusty floor no footsteps, and the china there on the dresser was blue-spotted with the damp. There was a queer musty smell about the place. Cobwebs spun threads upon the ships’ models, making their own ghostly rigging. No one lived here. No one came here.
I must have been the first person to put on that mackintosh since the handkerchief was used. She who had worn the coat then was tall, slim, broader than me about the shoulders, for I had found it big and overlong, and the sleeves had come below my wrist. Some of the buttons were missing. She had not bothered then to do it up. She had thrown it over her shoulders like a cape, or worn it loose, hanging open, her hands deep in the pockets.
I began to understand why some people could not bear the clamor of the sea. It has a mournful harping note sometimes, and the very persistence of it, that eternal roll and thunder and hiss, plays a jagged tune upon the nerves.
They only came to call at Manderley because they were curious and prying. They liked to criticize my looks, my manners, my figure, they liked to watch how Maxim and I behaved to each other, whether we seemed fond of one another, so that they could go back afterwards and discuss us, saying, “Very different from the old days.” They came because they wanted to compare me to Rebecca…
I had been selfish and hypersensitive, a martyr to my own inferiority complex.
The rhododendrons were upon us. Their hour would soon be over. Already they looked a little overblown, a little faded. Next month the petals would fall one by one from the great faces, and the gardeners would come and sweep them away. Theirs was a brief beauty. Not lasting very long.
I did not want anyone with me. Not even Maxim. If Maxim had been there I should not be lying as I was now, chewing a piece of grass, my eyes shut. I should have been watching him, watching his eyes, his expression. Wondering if he liked it, if he was bored. Wondering what he was thinking. Now I could relax, none of these things mattered.
“Do you think she can see us, talking to one another now?” she said slowly. “Do you think the dead come back and watch the living?”
I felt very much the same as I did the morning I was married. The same stifled feeling that I had gone too far now to turn back.
I felt I had forfeited her sympathy by my refusal to go down. I had shown the white feather. She had not understood. She belonged to another breed of men and women, another race than I. They had guts, the women of her race. They were not like me.
“I tell you what,” said the sailor, turning to me, “you ought to say you are a forget-me-not. They’re blue aren’t they? Jolly little flowers, forget-me-nots. That’s right, isn’t it, de Winter? Tell your wife she must call herself a ‘forget-me-not.’
Manderley stood out like an enchanted house, every window aflame, the gray walls colored by the falling stars. A house bewitched, carved out of the dark woods.
I wished my mind would rest like my body, relax, and pass to sleep. Not hum round in the way it did, jigging to music, whirling in a sea of faces. I pressed my hands over my eyes but they would not go.
As I sipped my cold tea I thought with a tired bitter feeling of despair that I would be content to live in one corner of Manderley and Maxim in the other so long as the outside world should never know.
He did not belong to me at all, he belonged to Rebecca. He still thought about Rebecca. He would never love me because of Rebecca. She was in the house still, as Mrs. Danvers had said; she was in that room in the west wing, she was in the library, in the morning room, in the gallery above the hall. Even in the little flower room, where her mackintosh still hung. And in the garden, and in the woods, and down in the stone cottage on the beach. Her footsteps sounded in the corridors, her scent lingered on the stairs. The servants obeyed her orders still, the food we ate was the food she liked. Her favorite flowers filled the rooms. Her clothes were in the wardrobes in her room, her brushes were on the table, her shoes beneath the chair, her nightdress on her bed. Rebecca was still mistress of Manderley. Rebecca was still Mrs. de Winter. I had no business here at all.
I could fight the living but I could not fight the dead.
She’s still mistress here, even if she is dead. She’s the real Mrs. de Winter, not you. It’s you that’s the shadow and the ghost. It’s you that’s forgotten and not wanted and pushed aside. Well, why don’t you leave Manderley to her? Why don’t you go?”
A bee hummed by me in search of scent, bumbling, noisy, and then creeping inside a flower was suddenly silent.
I was not young anymore. I was not shy. I was not afraid. I would fight for Maxim. I would lie and perjure and swear, I would blaspheme and pray. Rebecca had not won. Rebecca had lost.
I pictured them all down there in the bay, and the little dark hull of the boat rising slowly to the surface, sodden, dripping, the grass-green seaweed and shells clinging to her sides. When they lifted her onto the lighter the water would stream from her sides, back into the sea again. The wood of the little boat would look soft and gray, pulpy in places. She would smell of mud and rust, and that dark weed that grows deep beneath the sea beside rocks that are never uncovered. Perhaps the name-board still hung upon her stern.
Je Reviens. The lettering green and faded. The nails rusted through. And Rebecca herself was there, lying on the cabin floor.”
I noticed for the first time how the hydrangeas were coming into bloom, their blue heads thrusting themselves from the green foliage behind. For all their beauty there was something somber about them, funereal; they were like the wreaths, stiff and artificial, that you see beneath glass cases in a foreign churchyard. There they were, all the way along the drive, on either side of us, blue, monotonous, like spectators lined up in a street to watch us pass.
Every moment was a precious thing, having in it the essence of finality.
Back again into the moving unquiet depths. I was writing letters in the morning room. I was sending out invitations. I wrote them all myself with a thick black pen. But when I looked down to see what I had written it was not my small square handwriting at all, it was long, and slanting, with curious pointed strokes. I pushed the cards away from the blotter and hid them. I got up and went to the looking glass. A face stared back at me that was not my own. It was very pale, very lovely, framed in a cloud of dark hair. The eyes narrowed and smiled. The lips parted. The face in the glass stared back at me and laughed. And I saw then that she was sitting on a chair before the dressing table in her bedroom, and Maxim was brushing her hair. He held her hair in his hands, and as he brushed it he wound it slowly into a thick rope. It twisted like a snake, and he took hold of it with both hands and smiled at Rebecca and put it round his neck.
The road to Manderley lay ahead. There was no moon. The sky above our heads was inky black. But the sky on the horizon was not dark at all. It was shot with crimson, like a splash of blood. And the ashes blew towards us with the salt wind from the sea.
---
Initial 2020 review:
Putting aside the final third of the novel, this is perhaps my favorite thing I've read, ever.
They had guts, the women of her race. They were not like me.
I wish I was a woman of about thirty-six dressed in black satin with a string of pearls.
A dreamer, I walked enchanted, and nothing held me back.
Our nameless heroine is not a "strong female character." She's anxious, shy, clumsy, sensitive, insecure, easily embarrassed, and a melodramatic romantic. She gets lost in daydreams about the imagined lives of other people and about a fantasy version of her older future self, a self who is confident and funny and well-liked. For her, there are few things more horrifying than the prospect of sitting down to tea with a stranger and nobody to make conversation for her. She wants nothing but to be liked (or at least not
disliked) and for everyone to believe she's happy, regardless of what the reality may be.
She's also swept up into a whirlwind romance with a man who, in every respect, is on the upper hand of the power dynamic of their relationship: he's older (twice her age), rich, well-known, connected, and has been in a prior marriage (to Rebecca, the woman who looms large in the mind of the new Mrs. de Winter). She finds herself desperately out of place within the fine, imposing walls of Manderley—based on the author's real-life residence, the Menabilly estate—where everything seems to remind her that she is not good enough, that
she is not Rebecca.
The prose is ethereal. Lush and dreamlike, it flits between atmospheric descriptions of the gorgeous settings—the coastline of Monaco, the gardens of Manderley—and the narrator's nonstop internal dialogue, drifting in and out of daydreams and anxieties and the slow movements of Manderley and the surrounding society, all fraught with their own unseen perils.
It's slow, and contemplative, and I loved it.
Until about, oh, the end of Chapter 19, when the story takes a salacious turn that is, in my view, for the worse. Our heroine has a seemingly abrupt personality shift, growing confident and assertive, and makes a decision that makes her decidedly unlikeable. The prose grows more spare, the new locations feel drab, and the narrative unfolds with twists and turns that are to modern audiences (or, to me at least) somewhat predictable.
Up until that point, it seems that the novel will explore whether their marriage can survive when there is such an obvious power imbalance, regardless of Maxim's intention. Prior to Chapter 19, the romance, seen through the eyes of the heroine, is unbearably romantic; even if it's impossible to fully banish the thoughts that this is not a healthy relationship, it seems that there may be hope, if not for their marriage, than for the heroine's happiness, at least.
With Chapter 19, though, Mrs. de Winter loses most of her complexities and sympathetic qualities, and the novel turns into a standard mystery novel without much depth. It wasn't bad—it was just a disappointing departure from the magical, unique first two-thirds of the novel.
Beautiful writing
I struggled with this book a lot. I've started it about two years ago, read something like 30% and put it away, than again read the next 30% and stopped once again. Finally I've finished it and it isn't that bad after all.
What I really didn't like are all those descriptions of the gardens and landscapes. They are dull and boring. But the whole sombre and mysterious atmosphere of the story is very well-done and that is definitely one of the best parts of the book. The story is also pretty fascinating. I totally enjoyed the last 30% of the book, all the events after the ball, which are finally pushing the story to its end.
All in all, I struggle with this book a lot but I really liked the final part.
I'm the odd man out on this one. I just didn't like it much. Rebecca was a dreadful person; Mrs. Danvers is as well; Maxim is a predator and a creep who takes advantage of a desperate girl. And the plot drags unbearably. Give me Jane Eyre any day over this.
REBECCA This novel by Daphne du Maurier has it all: Gothic creepiness in a shadowy mansion, mystery, humour, romance, sapphism, arson and murder, with a twist in the tail- set in the glorious Cornish countryside. The book has never been out of print, which says it all.
About the Author:
DAPHNE DU MAURIER (1907-1989) was an English author and playwright. Many of her works were adapted into films, including the novels Rebecca and Jamaica Inn and the short stories "The Birds" and "Don't Look Now."
When you click the Amazon link and make a purchase, we may receive a small commision, at no cost to you.