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Manderley, "today we we pass on, we see it no more, and we are different, changed in some infinitesimal way. We can never be quite the same again." It's such a sensation, when you read a book and a place is so memorable that it stays with you. To have place, plot, and person in such congruency, this is a treat; it is when you know an author is at her best. When I remember this book, I won't think of Rebecca, the deceased wife, nor will I recall the nameless narrator and gullible young bride of the rich Max de Winter. Instead, I will remember Manderley and everything that happened there that is so palpable within this first person narrative. If I do think about these characters, I will think of them when I think of Manderley. And this is strange, because I think this is the first book that has placed such a reminder of place within my reading memory.

I love my copy, because not only does it have an author's note from Daphne du Maurier, which tells of her writing experience, but there's also an essay she wrote of her own house, Menabilly, the "house of secrets" that Manderley is modeled after. She saw the house after it lay in ruins and she visited it for years, feeling somehow drawn to the forsaken mansion. Later, it would become hers. She was thirty years old and stationed with her soldier husband in Alexandria, when she began writing this story. "I lose myself in the plot as it unfolds, and only when the book is finished do I lay it aside," she said. Judging from the splay of this plot, it is obvious that she did lose herself in it. Two hundred and seventy pages in, a new story arc emerges and yet manages to remain true to the rest of the book. And Manderley is still the main character.

Manderley, its "colour and scent and sound, rain and the lapping of water, even the mists of autumn and the smell of the flood tide, these are memories of Manderley that will not be denied." In the midst of scent and sound, there is mystery and deceit. The glorious mansion has its hidden flaws, its dark secrets, and as the story unfolds, the narrator, a young, poor, orphan, strives to become the sophisticated wife that she thinks her older husband desires. She is alarmingly annoying, and her housekeeper, Mrs. Danvers, peculiarly frightful, yet what I found fascinating is how characters and themes seem to be balanced on a beam.

What makes you happy? What terrifies you? How do you deal with trauma? How do you deal with guilt and shame? Do you try to fit in, or do you choose to become the most comfortable with who you are? What is the essence of partnership? What about consequences? Who are you, without everything and everyone around you, who are you, really?

When people suffer a great shock, like death, or the loss of a limb, I believe they don't feel it just at first. If your hand is taken from you you don't know, for a few minutes, that your hand is gone. You go on feeling the fingers. You stretch and beat them on the air, one by one, and all the time there is nothing there, no hand, no fingers.

Gloom resides at Manderley, and because of this, we view the mansion from a distance, in retrospective narrative tense. Manderley, "secretive and silent as it had always been…a jewel in the hollow of a hand." Our protagonist has experienced pain and trauma and love and life and she can never go home again, this much is clear from the first sentence, "Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again."