Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again.
The opening chapters of Rebecca by Daphne du Marier are a haunting introduction to a place we will come to know quite well by the end of the book. Our unnamed narrator takes us past the lodge house, up the long drive to the old house, all the while reflecting on how nature has begun to take over the grounds and land, and only the most intrepid poacher would dare to trespass. She then thinks on their lives now, living in small hotels under a foreign sun, desperately bored, but at least freed from all their ghosts. This reminiscing takes us seamlessly into a proper introduction of our narrator, her former employer Mrs. Hopper, and her soon-to-be husband, Maxim de Winter. The future Mrs. de Winter the 2nd is a paid companion to aforementioned Mrs. Hopper, and they are spending the season in Monte Carlo when they meet Maxim. He’s an object of curiosity and pity – he owns Manderly, a magnificent house on the coast of Cornwall, and lost his wife in a tragic accident merely one year before.
The first section of the book is taken up with the narrator’s introduction to Maxim, and the relationship they form while Mrs. Hopper is indisposed with the flu. Maxim is remote and sometimes condescending, but in that mysterious “I can change him!” way that is so attractive to a certain type of young woman. Our narrator is a bit of a pushover, distinctly aware of her class status as compared to Maxim and Mrs. Hopper, and already oddly obsessed with Maxim’s first wife, Rebecca.
Our next section takes us to Manderley after the wedding of Maxim and our Mrs. de Winter. Her awareness of her upward trajectory thanks to her marriage makes her terribly awkward and unsure of herself from the start. It’s both funny and deeply uncomfortable watching her shrink before Mrs. Danvers and run and hide from her new in-laws, but at the same time you want to shake her and tell her to ovary up! Mrs. Danvers is awful from the beginning and only gets away with her disdain toward our narrator because of the narrator’s own lack of self-confidence and belief that she’ll never measure up to the first Mrs. de Winter. But at times our narrator is quite perceptive; she realizes that she’s not much more than a pet to Maxim, someone to pay attention to only when it suits him, and otherwise forgotten. And she sees that she hasn’t truly become the mistress of Manderley, but is merely stepping into the place that Rebecca left behind. This entire act is a masterclass in building tension, as little mysteries start to pile up and Mrs. Danvers leads our narrator toward an easily-foreseeable public humiliation. (It was so tense, in fact, that I had to pause my audiobook to read a plot synopsis of the book to calm my nerves about what might happen. Damn, du Marier was good!)
No spoilers for those who haven’t read this yet, but the reveal of the mystery and what comes next were fascinating. You realize, like the narrator, that all your assumptions were wrong. When I finished the book I immediately went back and listened to the first two chapters again, to better understand them now that I knew what had led the de Winters to abandon England. The lush prose (which occurs throughout the novel) was even more compelling with a deeper understanding, and Rebecca is now on my list of classics that will get a regular re-read.