GREAT authors are deemed to be those giving profound and universal insights into the human condition. By that token, Daphne du Maurier falls short. However, for her grasp of atmosphere and sense of place, she is up there with the best. Rebecca has one of the most haunting introductions in English literature, starting with the killer, oft-quoted line: ‘Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again.’ The description of the overgrown track to the house, with its malevolent ivy, monster shrubs and the rhododendrons 50ft high is overwrought, but it sets the tone for the entire story, in which the imagined and the real weave in and out of each other.
The gaucherie of the second Mrs de Winter reflected the introvert author’s own insecurities
When du Maurier sent the manuscript to her publisher Victor Gollancz in 1938, she confessed that it was ‘on the gloomy side’, with a beginning that is also its conclusion and an ending that was ‘a bit brief and a bit grim’. Although she’d already enjoyed success as a novelist with the period piece Jamaica Inn, she forecast that Rebecca wouldn’t sell, but she was wrong. A page turner if ever there was one, it flew off the shelves, undergoing 28 printings in its first four years in Britain. It has never been out of print since.
Critics of the time were underwhelmed by du Maurier’s middlebrow style and dismissed Rebecca as ‘a woman’s romantic novel’. Du Maurier herself said: ‘My novels are what is known as popular and sell very well, but I am not a critic’s favourite, indeed I am generally dismissed with a sneer as a bestseller and not reviewed at all.’
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