Classics Review: Rebecca is a modern fairy tale, a variation of the story of an orphaned farm girl ("poor nameless wife"), a dashing prince, and a ghost. Daphne du Maurier (1907-89) wrote many novels but this is the one that made her name and for which she's remembered. Foreshadowed in the famous first line, the great house Manderley is the center of the story, as if poor nameless wife was venturing into a labyrinth, into the Beast's castle, into darkness. As in the best fairy tales, the story mixes romance, mystery, and self discovery. Beautifully told, Rebecca is perfect in tone and construction in the same way as The Remains of the Day. One can quibble about plot points and characters, but it's perfect in the telling. Captured, the reader is drawn into and becomes part of the story. One may grow impatient with poor nameless wife's insecurity, but that flaw is understood and recognized. We identify with her naive and unworldly vision at twenty-one. Trapped by her virtual wicked stepmother, we learn she has a "lovely and unusual name" and then is magically swept off by a man twice her age to become a de Winter, "of winter." As we live in her mind we see through her eyes, her jealousy, and her wild, untamable imagination (a latter-day Catherine Morland). Her transformation is told in language that's at times archaic, but is also rich, descriptive, vivid: "There were petals at my feet too, brown and sodden, bearing their scent upon them still, and a richer, older scent as well, the smell of deep moss and bitter earth, the stems of bracken, and the twisted roots of trees." Also a 1940 black and white film with Joan Fontaine, Laurence Olivier, and directed by Alfred Hitchcock, which crept into my mind while reading. A Gothic novel, a relative of Jane Eyre (1847), Rebecca is as much experience and atmosphere as story. I never want to be too cynical to enjoy this book. [5★]
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