It takes some restraint to write about Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca without quoting the first sentence. But there. I think I’ve managed. No, sorry, can’t do it:
Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again.
It wouldn’t be the same without it.
Actually, last night I did go back to Manderley again, or at least I caught up with Ben Wheatley’s glossy new take on Rebecca. Every generation needs their own and this one had plenty to like about it, not least a relatively sympathetic portrayal of Mrs Danvers by Kristin Scott Thomas. She played the housekeeper as a woman in the throes of grief for the person she loved most in the world and bagged some of the best lines in the film. “Women can either get married or go into service,” she tells the second Mrs de Winter, making explicit that, without Maxim, the protagonist doesn’t have many choices, either. (There’s an interesting glance to camera at the end that makes me think about this again.)
As a production, it was sleekly stylish, but not flawless – James, as the second Mrs de Winter, was so striking, so pretty, so likeable that it was hard to imagine her being outdazzled by anyone. Nor was I completely convinced by the chemistry between her and Armie Hammer’s rather young Maxim, though it was fun to see a sexier take on the story. Sex drives a lot of the plot in Rebecca, but there’s remarkably little of it on the pages.
Wheatley added interesting twists to the narrative but was still faithful to the high notes – that proposal (“I’m asking you to marry me, you little fool”), the costume ball, Mrs Danvers’, ahem, private tour around the spooky west wing. It made for a perplexing mixture. I would have preferred more of a commitment to experimentation – a closer look at what went on in Manderley through today’s post-#MeToo eyes. The film goes up to the edge of saying something interesting and then skitters away.
That said, I enjoyed Lily James’s natural delivery of that famous first sentence. It’s difficult to deliver such a weighty line, as I found myself on Kate Weinberg’s podcast Shelf Help, on which I discussed the enduring influence of Rebecca and du Maurier on my writing. I heard that first line long before I read the novel. My mother had a habit of previewing books before I was old enough to read them myself (I remember her going through the entire plot for Gone with the Wind one night before bed; in her defence she never gave away the twist in Rebecca). She always promised I could read du Maurier when I was old enough and then, in the summer of 1993, I was.
This is me at that time…
This is generally what I did – sit on my own on family holidays, my nose in a book, not bothering to clean my feet. Every single photo from our Disneyworld album is like that. Looking back makes me feel sad. Books were always my escape, my safe place. My adored father had died in 1991, quite suddenly at the age of forty-nine, and it strikes me now how soon after his leaving I discovered the writer who would go on to influence me more than any other.
Du Maurier had father issues too. Hers, the actor-manager Gerald du Maurier, had an at times almost unhealthily close relationship with his second daughter. The theatrical du Mauriers were terrible teasers and, like most families, had their own private shorthand– to indulge in a “tell-him” was to be boring, to be “wain” was to be embarrassed and a “fearful menace” was someone very attractive. Gerald, something of a menace himself, had numerous affairs – not least, or so it’s said, with the actress Gertrude Lawrence, whom Daphne allegedly had a thing with in later life (small sidenote: my dad and I did not resemble the du Mauriers in this way). Nevertheless, despite the complexities of their relationship (on hearing of Daphne’s engagement, Gerald was said to have cried out “it isn’t fair”), Daphne adored her father.
It felt like a strange sort of magic, discovering Rebecca as a 13-year-old girl who’d just lost her charismatic father. It’s a book about a rather sad, serious young woman, who’s also just lost her father and falls for a powerful older man, by a writer who’d recently lost her own. Gerald died in 1934 and, three years later, Daphne began Rebecca in Alexandria, Egypt, where her husband Major Frederick Browning, the commanding officer of the 2nd Battalion Grenadier Guards, had been posted.
Shy and an inveterate people-pleaser, she was struggling with the social pressures of being an army wife – feelings that push their way through onto the page. In the hot, dry climate, she desperately missed Cornwall, where her family had had a house since 1926, and her longing for the English countryside is everywhere in Rebecca: her intimate knowledge of seasonal cycles, the scents and the sounds of the Cornish countryside – the rhododendrons, bluebells and azaleas. I particularly love the description of the pigeons in the opening pages, fluttering like “old ladies caught at their ablutions”.
“More than a house…”
In a book where names are all-important, the restraint inherent in Maxim, the chilliness of de Winter, the strength of Rebecca (a name that means to tie or snare) and, of course, the namelessness of the second Mrs de Winter – the first we hear is the name of the house. Manderley was inspired by Menabilly hidden away on the Gribbin peninsula in Cornwall – a place Daphne professed to adore more than most people, which she first discovered, very much on purpose, on a trespassing ramble with her sister Angela and later went on to rent for many years. “Menabilly was always more than a house to Daphne du Maurier,” writes Margaret Forster in her brilliant 1993 biography.
Rebecca has been described as a story about two women, a man and a house, but, of course, it’s much more than that. Despite some sniffy reviews (VS Pritchett predicted it “would be here today, gone tomorrow”, LOL), it is a novel that readers adore, still selling as many as 4,000 copies a month – the sorts of numbers most writers only dream of. There are many reasons for this – there’s the killer twist, of course. Du Maurier wrote in her notes before writing:
“I want to build up the character of the first [wife] in the mind of the second... until wife 2 is haunted day and night... a tragedy is looming very close and crash! bang! something happens.”
But before the crash-bang moment, there’s the slow build of dread – the portents of doom from Mrs Van Hopper when her employee falls in love with the wealthy widower, their arrival at Manderley, the chilly reception from Mrs Danvers, that slanting R of Rebecca everywhere, her scent on a handkerchief in a coat pocket; all wonderfully Gothic.
Then there’s the universality of the second Mrs de Winter’s experience – her insecurities and self-doubt, which spoke to me so powerfully as a young reader. Other people felt like that too – daunted by the shadow of someone else – the one who went before us, be it a girlfriend, wife, or simply the person who previously had our job. Today’s psych suspense novels, including my own, are fuelled by such insecurities, helped along nicely by social media. (On Shelf Help, we had fun speculating about how unbearable Rebecca would have been on Instagram, posing among the rhododendrons, while the second Mrs de Winter spent all her time poring over her feed.)
Du Maurier said Rebecca was, in part, inspired by her feelings about Jan Ricardo, her husband’s striking former fiancée, who later died in tragic circumstances, throwing herself in front of a train. It seems interesting that the beautiful daughter of a famous family, who had a publishing contract by the age of twenty-three, could feel inadequate. Telling, but not impossible. Female jealousy is something I often end up thinking and writing about. We never seem to hear about male jealousy in quite the same way. It’s almost as if women have been led to believe there’s not enough of the good stuff to go round – money, attention, power – I can’t IMAGINE where we got that idea…
Rebecca isn’t just about female jealousy, though – it seems to inspire it, too. When I first watched the Hitchcock film, I struggled to warm to Joan Fontaine, whom I felt wasn’t quite right. It took me years to realise that my problem with her – and the same could be true, to some extent, of Rebecca fans who’ve objected to James – was that I felt she’d taken my role. I was the second Mrs de Winter. It was my story – testament to du Maurier’s brilliant writing in that close, claustrophobic first-person point of view.
Je reviens
My identification with the second Mrs de Winter was so enduring that it inspired my first novel, The Girl Before You. The story opens when Alice spots an ex of her husband’s on a train, though the ex in question, Ruth, is thought to have drowned fifteen years ago. (Je reviens, I suppose.) Alice begins to dig at the past and it twists away from her. Like du Maurier, I was interested in exploring the relationship between “a man who is powerful and a woman who is not”. Also, like her, I suspect, there’s as much of me in the reckless Ruth (or, in her case, the dazzling Rebecca) as there is the docile Alice. I’ve always enjoyed writing mean-girl characters who are much closer to Rebecca than her successor: Kat in The Girl Before You, Juliet in You and Me.
Why does Rebecca speak to so many of us? Why is it a book we return to again and again? I wonder if it’s to relive all the anguish and intensity of first love, or to remind ourselves we’re not alone in our insecurities. It’s certainly a book you can read in many different ways. I suspect I’m not alone in my ever-deepening sympathy for Mrs Danvers, as I get older. What a different story it would be if it were told from her point of view.
In a nice touch of circularity, I visited du Maurier’s Cornwall with my mum in 2016. We saw Ferryside, her family home in Bodinnick (pictured above), which clings to the rocks overlooking the estuary, and did the Hall Walk, which runs above Ferryside and follows Pont Pill east to the head of the river, where you cross the water and can visit the church where Daphne married Browning in 1932.
The glimpses of the green water below, on this walk, called to mind du Maurier’s swashbuckling Restoration romance Frenchman’s Creek. Further downstream in Polruan, we traced the movements of the heroine, Dona St Columb, who steals a boat with her pirate lover and crosses over the river to Fowey (we took the passenger ferry instead).
“Then, like all dreamers, I was possessed of a sudden with supernatural powers and passed like a spirit through the barrier before me…”
In Fowey, our guide showed us Readymoney Cove, where Daphne lived in 1942, before she was offered the lease at Menabilly by Dr Rashleigh (Daphne was heartbroken when the house returned to his son in 1969). On the road to Readymoney, the iron gates at Point Neptune (pictured above), a large Victorian house, are thought to be similar to or, possibly, even the very ones that were removed from Menabilly’s East Lodge. After we said goodbye to our guide, we were hungry for the real thing and went on an off-piste expedition to look for Menabilly, which is still privately owned by the Rashleigh family and shrouded from public view by the surrounding woodland.
We set off, a touch of the hysteria in the car, as determined to find it as du Maurier herself was back in 1926. Suffice to say, we were less successful and the closest we got were the gates, where we stopped and peered through, desperate for a glimpse of the house. We couldn’t see much – nor, like the dreaming protagonist in Rebecca, could we pass through the bars. But somehow it was enough to be standing there together at the place where it all began. I’ll never be able to resist the temptation to return to Manderley again.
Image credits (from top): Canva/Andrew Songhurst; Hilary Rayner; Canva/Diego Torres; Nicola Rayner.