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"If only there could be an invention that bottled up a memory, like scent."

I read this novel as a very young girl, and remembered it as a love story. Because I couldn't bottle up my memory like scent, I had this odd flavour of romance in my nose, and wasn't keen to smell it again, having no interest at all in that kind of fiction. However, as life tosses and turns one around, I felt compelled to reread it on a too hot, oppressive summer day.

And I was captivated, quite despite myself. What a gorgeously intense psychological thriller this is! The main character is either a mansion, Manderley, or a woman who died a year before the narrative starts. Both house and heroine are veiled in mystery, and the young nameless narrator of the story has to literally peel the onion step by step to get to the core of pain that hovers over her moody, taciturn husband and his strange entourage.

At times, the young lady got on my nerves, being a bit like David Copperfield - too naive to understand the story told by himself. But Daphne Du Maurier, like Dickens, pulls it off. It works. And as the reader slowly learns to see the different interpretations of truth as seen by Maxim de Winter, Mrs Danvers, Mr Favell, Frank Crawley etc., the story starts to resemble the masterpieces of dark entanglement of Du Maurier's predecessors. Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights come to mind.

As for the evil spirit of Rebecca, she has a worthy successor in Steinbeck's East of Eden. Cathy was the first female character to scare me witless. She would have got along well with the beautiful wicked witch of the West in Manderley.

A perfect scare for a hot summer night, with thunder and lightning looming over dry landscapes, keeping the tension without breaking out in a relieving rain shower.