The Novel That Won't Go Away

Last year The New York Times did a well-deserved tribute to Daphne du Maurier:

“What happened was “Rebecca,” an instant best seller that has never gone out of print and still sells about 50,000 copies a year, according to its British publishers. The novel inspired the film adaptation directed by Alfred Hitchcock, spinoffs and a line of watches. It even found admirers on both sides of the war: Neville Chamberlain took his copy with him when he flew to Munich to meet Hitler, and the Germans, in turn, fashioned a cryptogram from the text.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/06/books/daphne-du-maurier-enthusiast.html

What the article failed to point out is that Rebecca is still assigned reading in many American high schools and is, therefore, often not available during the school year at one’s local library (a fact happily discovered by this writer just last week).

Another new discovery: a scholarly introduction to the novel. When I was writing my graduate school thesis on Rebecca in the late 1990s, this did not exist. Rebecca was still published in mass-market paperback form, replete with red satin cover image typical of drug store romance novels. You opened the book and there you were, right in the opening dream sequence.

I always felt that Rebecca deserved so much more; happily Everyman’s Library has provided. Their 2017 publication of the novel includes a scholarly instruction by British author, critic and journalist Lucy Hughes-Hallet, who writes an extraordinary appreciation of the imagery, subtlety, and complexity of this stunning novel that simply won’t go away.

For a Sunday bonus, read about the man who learned to love literature from Rebecca:

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/aug/20/rebecca-daphne-du-maurier-classic-literature

A Timelessness and a Universality

Rebecca, Daphne du Maurier’s most famous novel not out of publication since its 1938 release, was initially insulted by the label “woman’s novel.”

No help was du Maurice herself, who wrote in her pre-draft notes:

“Very roughly, the book will be about the influence of a first wife on a second...until wife 2 is haunted day and night…a tragedy is looming very close and crash! Bang! Something happens.”

Rebecca has been a part of my literary life since age ten, when I first read it and had the initial young-girl-captivated-by-a-romantic-English-novel reaction. What did I know?

It wasn’t until I returned to Rebecca in graduate school and realized how much more there was to it. While Rebecca is set contemporaneously in 1938 and the English class system is about to topple, it is very much about the refreshing nature of uncomplicated love. Maxim’s attraction to the young woman he meets in Monte Carlo cannot be more absurd, by the standards of his lord-of-the-manor background. She is American, she is penniless, and she is working for the oppressive Mrs. Van Hopper as a “paid companion.” I can almost hear the equally-oppressive Lady Catherine de Bourgh, of Pride and Prejudice, admonishing Elizabeth when talk of marriage to her nephew, the formidable Fitzwilliam Darcy ensues: “The upstart pretensions of a young woman without family, connections, or fortune. Is this to be endured!”

Of course Rebecca is also one of the greatest ghost stories ever written, complete with English manor, brooding husband, and evil householder, Mrs. Danvers, who, in Hitchcock’s film could not have been played more perfectly by Judith Anderson.

Rebecca is also about facades, and the emotional exhaustion it takes to keep them up in order to not lose face in society. The unnamed narrator of the story, who becomes the second Mrs. De Winter, knows nothing of facades because she is the definition of “what you see is what you get.” She has nothing to hide; indeed, she wouldn’t even know how to hide something were she asked to do so.

Until the forced circumstances of living up to mistress-of-the-manor expectations prove to be too much. It is at this precise point that she begins to crack, just like the china cupid she knocks over onto the floor. She has been indoctrinated into the need to have secrets. Clearly, you cannot live at the grand Manderley without them.

Ultimately, though, I love Rebecca for its timelessness and its universality; the way in which this novel could have been written in almost any era of the 19th or 20th centuries:

“The room would bear witness to our presence. The little heap of library books marked ready to return, and the discarded copy of The Times. Ashtrays, with the stub of a cigarette; cushions, with the imprint of our heads upon them, lolling in the chairs; the charred embers of our log fire still smoldering against the morning. And Jasper, dear Jasper, with his soulful eyes and great, sagging jowl, would be stretched upon the floor, his tail a-thump when he heard his master’s footsteps.”

Autumn is upon us and a cool breeze has descended. What a perfect time to put on a pot of tea and curl up with one of my many copies of the divine Rebecca.