Book Review: "Rebecca" By Daphne DuMaurier

"Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again...

Working as a lady's companion, the heroine of "Rebecca" learns her place. Her future looks bleak until, on a trip to the South of France, she meets Max DeWinter, a handsome widower whose sudden proposal of marriage takes her by surprise. She accepts, but whisked from glamorous Monte Carlo to the ominous and brooding Manderley, the new Mrs DeWinter finds Max a changed man. And the memory of his dead wife Rebecca is forever kept alive by the forbidding housekeeper, Mrs Danvers..."

First things first, don't "click to look inside." Or, feel free, but nothing will happen. This is the Amazon image and it's too late, and I'm too lazy, to edit it. The Virago edition is superb, and can be found on Amazon here.

Ok that's the preliminary bits over and done with. Now, an admission. "Rebecca" is the April text for my book club, and I have never read it before. I hate saying that: people always assume that because I read so much I must have read all of the classics, they seem disappointed when my ignorance is exposed.

The first half of Rebecca deals with the theme of a palpable and suffocating isolation. The unnamed heroine has been dragged to Monte Carlo as the companion of the insufferable Mrs Van Hopper, embarrassed by her patron's vulgarity but forced to endure it by her lowly position. Even when enjoying the attentions of Maxim DeWinter she is out of place, he has other things on his mind, and she is a lost little girl clinging to affection. When they reach glorious Manderley Mrs DeWinter's isolation is even more pronounced: through long, languid descriptions of the gardens, the coast, the house, we are immediately aware that Rebecca is still the presiding influence in the house, and the terrifying Mrs Danvers loses no opportunity to exploit her mistress's timidity. Mrs DeWinter's reticence can at times be very frustrating: but her utter spinelessness is, after all, what contrasts her with Rebecca. It's why Maxim married her, and it throws Rebecca's larger than life character into even sharper relief.

The second half of the book deals with Max's attempts, with his wife's devoted support, to literally get away with murder. Mrs DeWinter's desperate quest for affection is here thrown into the spotlight: Maxim's crime means he belongs to her, and she vindicates him without a moment's hesitation. The heroine certainly feels this to be an empowering experience: she gains courage, starts to act like the mistress of the house, and begins to plan a future in which her own tastes and desires rule Manderley. This part of the book can be very disturbing. There certainly is an element of empowerment: Maxim puts his fate in his wife's hands, however it can also be read as a complete submission to Maxim's will, with affection as the reward. When you look back to the flash-forwards at the start of the novel this second reading becomes more dominant: Mrs DeWinter will continue to live to please Maxim, not reminding him of Manderley, not satisfying her own wishes, the two living in purgatory for their crimes.

The characters of the book also have their fates divided into two by the dominant event: the fate of Rebecca. In the first half of the novel the characters tip toe around each other, all with palpable secrets and guilt, none wishing to share or support. In the second half of the book their secrets are exposed and their frailty allows the heroine to feel a sense of superiority and power over them. The pairing of Rebecca and the heroine is endlessly intriguing and could fuel a book in itself: one never seen, with a superhuman presence, named and fearsome; the other seen but shrinking, nameless and impotent. the duality of these individuals throughout the book is its greatest triumph.

In its plot, and its central themes of isolation, guilt and redemption "Rebecca" has drawn unfavourable comparisons to Jane Eyre. I am not a fan of Charlotte Bronte. Bronte's style may be more elevated but DuMaurier's interplay between her two women, their imagined conflicts, the clash of the two personalities, and the machinations of Rebecca's sinister agent Mrs Danvers, serve to create a much greater tension, and to never see Rebecca allows us to draw our own conclusions about her conduct and her fate, she is a much more powerful creation, in all senses, than Bertha.

I absolutely loved this book. Yes, it's a gothic romance, sometimes clumsy, sometimes ridiculous, but hauntingly beautiful in its exploration of female power.

9.5/10

In which I abuse the hackneyed cliche that writing one's first story is akin to birthing one's first child, with predictable results.

As an individual I am little more than the amalgamation of my life's influences, and at the moment I am mostly influenced by Angela Carter. So this may get bawdy. Or it may not, owing to the fact that my outlook on life has been Austen-ised by some 20% of late.

A couple of months ago I wrote that my writing career (I haven't got a better word for it) had stalled at the outset. A lot has happened since then.

My two-year-old son is holding court at Grandma's house, declaring loudly that he is "not a scallywag, just Jack", whilst paradoxically claiming that he "doesn't miss Mummy."

My first short story "Champagne Melodrama" is out in the big wide world, fending for itself against its peers and the judge(s) of the 2011 Jane Austen Short Story award whilst I maintain a respectful yet worried distance, a mother waiting at the gates of school on The First Day, anxious not to cause embarrassment by her presence.

And this is how it happened.

They started in the same manner, "Champagne" and Jack, in that their initial inspiration was given to me by someone else. That last sentence was more Carter than Austen, or maybe it's the other way round. Anyway, it was easy to grow my story having been offered the seed of the theme "Heroes and Villains in Jane Austen." I started journaling furiously, trying to develop my initial idea of a confrontation between Lucy Steele of "Sense and Sensibility" and Harriet Smith of "Emma", both of whom I consider to be villains in their stories. At the twelve week scan stage I had a grainy, blobby story outline which only people close to me could love, and only I could understand.

Then came the glorious second trimester: I felt great, reinvigorated by the creative process, I could literally feel the story move and grow even as I should have been focusing on my "real" work, and as Lucy went about destroying Harriet's mind I gleefully looked forward to a time when my little masterpiece would be complete. Oh, how naive.

In the third trimester I stared in desperation at the computer screen, cursing the bloated, cumbersome and unwieldy creation which was causing me headache, back ache and more than my usual (which is to say considerable) bad temper. I howled, roared and demanded of my story that it shed the excess verbiage and produce itself, fully formed before the deadline of 31st March. Or else. I grew sick of reading, editing, printing, reading, reading, editing editing editing, and people asking me "any sign of it yet?".

The evening before I finally posted my story found me swearing, pulling my hair out and complaining loudly. Then at long last Harriet drove off with Robert Ferrars, I printed my last and proudly leafed through the final manuscript of my little darling. I posted it the next day, the 21st March, ten days before the due date.

Which is nothing like real life. Granted, I spent the two days before Jack's birth being sent back and forth from hospital, thinking I was ready and being told kindly (but infuriatingly) that I wasn't finished yet; but the final, harrowing moments on the operating table (things had gone badly wrong by then) where my child was literally dragged into existence two weeks late made finishing my story seem like an afternoon tea party by comparison.

I'm not sure what this analogy really shows. Perhaps it shows that once the creative spark exists, it demands to be nurtured and brought to fruition. Or perhaps it shows that pain is fleeting, since I'm already embarking on my next attempt. At a story, that is. Or maybe it shows neither of these things, and illustrates only that when one wants to achieve something, one will do absolutely anything, including but not limited to the destruction of much loved public domain texts and physical violence to computers, to make it happen.