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

This beautiful first line is instantly recognisable, and has passed into our culture. Like all great openings it captures our imagination and makes us want to read more. The rhythm is insistent, the mention of dreams intrigues us and the word "Manderley" echoes somewhere in our subconscious. We are already in danger of falling under Daphne Du Maurier's hypnotic spell.

Generally regarded as Daphne du Maurier's masterpiece, Rebecca has never been out of print since it was first published in 1938 - a comparatively early novel. A tempestuous gothic romance, it was an immediate success, making its author into a household name. The story of the mysterious, glamorous ex-wife, the mousy replacement, the brooding and brusque Maxim de Winter and all the intrigue and drama which circle around these three characters is too well-known to need repeating in precis here.

Rebecca captured the feel of the age, drawing on the glamour of country society and the feeling of impending catastrophe that permeated the pre-war years. Du Maurier knew this society well, having been born into a wealthy family in London in 1907. She herself was a tomboy as a child however, and much preferred visiting the family's holiday home of Ferryside, to participating in London society. All these threads of her life, and many others, come together in this masterly novel. Many people love its high romanticism, but Daphne du Maurier became irritated over the years with people calling it a romantic novel. She insisted that it was in part "a study in jealousy" and also a depiction of a powerful man and a weak woman.

Our first introduction to Manderley comes when the narrator is also approaching the estate for the first time. It is an ominous journey, laden with foreboding,

"This drive twisted and turned as a serpent, scarce wider in places than a path, and above our heads was a great colonnade of trees, whose branches nodded and intermingled with each other... Even the midday sun would not penetrate the interlacing of those green leaves, they were too thickly entwined, one with another."

The mood continues with the first glimpse of the great house itself, with rhododendrons against a "blood-red wall." The apprehensive narrator refers to the "slaughterous red, luscious and fantastic."

Later though, Manderley seems to have exerted a different influence over the viewpoint character. She has a far calmer view, describing,

"a thing of beauty, exquisite and faultless, lovelier even than I had ever dreamed, built in its hollow of smooth grassland and mossy lawns, the terraces sloping to the gardens, and the gardens to the sea."

And a few hours later, when events turn and seem to come crashing down about her ears, the mood switches again. She looks through the window observing,

"a hurrying cloud hid the sun for a moment as I watched, and the sea changed colour instantly, becoming black, and the white crests were then very pitiless suddenly, and cruel."

The extraordinary and magnificent creation of "Manderley" was inspired in the main by Menabilly, a house the author had known about for many years. Menabilly had been empty for 20 years; it was totally covered with ivy and in a terrible state of decay at this time, but Du Maurier was determined to to live there one day. She had taken her three young children trespassing in the grounds a couple of years earlier, and apparently they all peered through the broken windows as she kissed the house and told them it was her favourite place. The family were living in "Ferryside", in Fowey, about four miles away. She did subsequently manage to lease Menabilly for 20 years, arranging all the renovations herself and the family moved there. It came as a great shock to her when many years later as an old woman she was told to leave the house she loved. But that is another story.

The actual setting of Manderley also mirrors the setting of Menabilly, which is hidden away in the woods by the Gribbin Head outside Fowey. Manderley has such presence in the novel that the reader senses it more as a character than a place. In fact in many of Du Maurier's works places are more important than people. While she was in Egypt, she had even confessed to missing Menabilly more than her two children. Her husband, a commanding officer in the Grenadier Guards, was stationed in Alexandria, and this is where she wrote the first rough draft of Rebecca. In 1937 she returned home - not to Menabilly yet, but to "Ferryside", which the Du Maurier family bought in the 1920's, and which is still the family home to this day.

Manderley was also partly based on Milton Hall in Cambridgeshire, which Du Maurier visited in her youth. It was here she conceived the character of Mrs Danvers, after seeing a tall dark housekeeper there. The insidiously malevolent character of Mrs Danvers is an extraordinary creation, with her white "skull's face" and her obsession with Rebecca. Another twisted, tortured and essentially broken character, who nevertheless exercises a powerful hold over weaker personalities,

"I shall never forget the expression on her face, loathsome, triumphant. The face of an exulting devil. She stood there, smiling at me."

Du Maurier drew many other aspects of the novel from her own life, in addition to the wonderful depiction of Manderley, and the the grotesquerie of Mrs Danvers. The seed of the story lay in Daphne Du Maurier's jealousy of Jan Ricardo, the first fiancée of her husband. And who apparently signed "Jan Ricardo" with a dramatic great R - a portentous curlicue that is emulated in the book,

"The name Rebecca stood out black and strong, the tall and sloping R dwarfing the other letters." And elsewhere, "That bold, slanting hand, stabbing the white paper, the symbol of herself, so certain, so assured."

Jan Ricardo later threw herself under a train, and it is said that the author was haunted by the suspicion that her husband remained attracted to Ricardo.

Daphne Du Maurier herself was notoriously shy and withdrawn. She writes herself into the story as the unconfident narrator. The fact that this viewpoint character is nameless and almost anonymous has always intrigued readers of the novel. The most obvious interpretation is that the second timid Mrs de Winter had such a low self-image that she becomes a mere shadow. The truth is rather more prosaic. Du Maurier couldn't think what to call the character at first, and so she didn't call her anything. As the novel progressed it became a challenge. And at some point presumably, she realised that the lack of a name cleverly symbolised the character's lack of self-worth.

We do know that the narrator is "not yet 21", as a contrast to Maxim's given age of 42, and she went to a fairly well-to-do boarding school. We even have glimpses of the narrator's name, which tempts us to believe that at some point it may be revealed to us. There is a reference early on to her name on an envelope being spelled correctly; that it is a rare occurrence. And Maxim says,

"You have a very lovely and unusual name... it becomes you as well as it became your father." (An oblique reference here perhaps, to the author's own father, the actor Gerald Du Maurier, whom she idolised and who in turn viewed Daphne as his favourite daughter.)

Alfred Hitchcock memorably made an Oscar-winning film of Rebecca in 1940. His casting of Laurence Olivier, who immortalised the moody figure of Maxim, was perfect in Du Maurier's opinion. Her overall view of the film may not have been quite so favourable, however. Subsequent versions tend to stay closer to the plot, but in this initial film, Daphne Du Maurier's ending was considered far too shocking and "immoral" for the audiences of the time, with the perpetrator of a serious crime escaping justice, and so it was changed.

Olivier himself had originally wanted Vivien Leigh to play opposite him, but in the event, Joan Fontaine proved a much better choice as the naïve insecure second Mrs de Winter. Interestingly, in the Hitchcock film, the whole crew called her "Daphne" on the shoot, although the character is written as "I" in the script. Hitchcock's was the start of many dramatisations and adaptations of the novel; its popularity continues even now. There has even, perhaps surprisingly, been a musical, an overblown pantomime-styled adaptation by all accounts, where Mrs Danvers was "boooed" every time she came on to the stage.

Maxim de Winter, viewed through the eyes of the woman who loves him, is an enigmatic character. He is portrayed much on the lines of Mr Fitzwilliam Darcy in "Pride and Prejudice", or Mr Rochester in "Jane Eyre". In fact Rebecca is heavily in debt to "Jane Eyre", with one crucial dramatic scene at the end lifted in its entirety. Maxim de Winter has all the desirable features of a typical masculine Victorian hero; he is handsome, heroic, but also very irritable. His proposal of marriage to his second wife consists in him snapping out the words, "I'm asking you to marry me, you little fool". Essentially he is a haunted and very private character. The narrator despairs, as he calls her "my sweet child" or "my good child" when he particularly wants to patronise or scold her. On one occasion she notes gloomily,

"The smile was my reward. Like a pat on the head for Jasper. Good dog then, lie down, don't worry me any more."

On another, Maxim says to her,

"You had a twist to your mouth and a flash of knowledge in your eyes. Not the right sort of knowledge... Listen my sweet... a husband is not so very different from a father after all. There is a certain type of knowledge I prefer you not to have."

This type of writing is difficult and uncomfortable for the modern reader to accept. Actually, such jarring notes are much more noticable in Du Maurier's novels where the viewpoint character is female. The author said herself that she felt much more comfortable writing male characters. She even went so far as to say that she felt herself to be a man in a woman's body.

Nevertheless, even though in general female characters are possibly not portrayed as convincingly as male ones in Du Maurier's stories, in this particular case it does work. Rebecca is a highly charged novel, and such portrayals and attitudes need to be viewed as being within the mores and context of this type of novel, observing its conventions. It is essentially a gothic melodrama, redolent with grotesque characters such as Mrs Danvers, and to a lesser degree the appalling Mrs Van Hopper, the shallow spoilt wealthy woman to whom the second Mrs de Winter was a companion at the start of the novel. And as such, it also contains as a counter-weight, the sort of heroes and heroines we might also associate with a previous century,

"They suffered because they could not break out from their own web of shyness and reserve, and in their blindness and folly built up a great distorted wall in front of them that hid the truth."

The relationship between the couple we are following is consistent with this period feel. It is very uneven and exaggerated, with the viewpoint character being completely tongue-tied with him, and increasingly cowed and made neurotic by her perception of her predecessor. She could talk to his legal advisor Frank Crawley, or his sister Beatrice, about Rebecca, with no such qualms. But not with her husband,

"He did not belong to me at all, he belonged to Rebecca. He still thought about Rebecca. He would never love me because of Rebecca. She was in the house still... and in the garden...her footsteps sounded in the corridors, her scent lingered on the stairs... Rebecca was still mistress of Manderley. Rebecca was still Mrs de Winter. I had no business here at all... Rebecca, always Rebecca."

"I could fight the living but I could not fight the dead...Rebecca would never grow old. Rebecca would always be the same. And her I could not fight. She was too strong for me."

The oppressive timbre of the novel shifts. Sometimes the threat is such as this, a sense of Rebecca; sometimes Mrs Danvers. Other times it is Manderley itself. And sometimes the sensations are blended, so that Manderley and Mrs Danvers almost become one. At other times, the narrator has moments of happiness, such as this time, shortly before a fancy dress ball, full of optimism at the exciting forthcoming event. She describes Manderley thus,

"the drawing-room, formal and cold to my consideration when we were alone, was a blaze of colour... and the hall itself wore a strange waiting air, there was a warmth about it I had never known before...The old austerity had gone. Manderley had come alive in a fashion I would not have believed possible. It was not the still quiet Manderley I knew. There was a certain significance about it now that had not been before. A reckless air, rather triumphant, rather pleasing. It was as if the house remembered other days, long long ago."

Yet later, when events had taken a dramatic turn for the worse,

"The tall shrubs looked dark and drab now that the colour had gone. A fog was rolling up from the sea and I could not see the woods beyond the bank. It was very hot, very oppressive...The sun had gone in now beyond a wall of mist. It was as though a blight had fallen upon Manderley taking the sky away and the light of day... The dark trees loomed thin and indistinct... The mist in the trees had turned to moisture and dripped upon my bare head like a thin rain. The clammy oppression of the day... the sea, sullen and slow"

Rebecca is a true classic. The overwhelming aura of, "Rebecca with her beauty, her charm, her breeding," permeates the entire book. Yet Rebecca never appears. Not once. It is unique of its kind. Not only because of that, but also because "Rebecca" is ostensibly the heroine of the book; its title character. She makes her presence felt solely through the narrator - who had never even met her. It is a book which can be read on many levels, and is open to different interpretations, as many great works are.

Take the opening sentence, whose hypnotic rhythm I referred to at the start of this review. Have you noticed the structure? It is an iambic hexameter (there are 6 lengths - 6 "di-dahs") which along with the iambic pentameter (5 lengths) is often used in English poetry and plays. Was this deliberate? Was it subliminal? For a moment I wondered if the author's own name, "Daphne Du Maurier" becomes an iambic hexameter if you double it up. To echo that would perfectly demonstrate to me how much of herself she puts into her novels. But in fact it becomes a dactylic tetrameter (the dactylic poetic foot being one stressed followed by two unstressed ie "dum-di-di"."Tetrameter" simply means four poetic feet, so four lots of "dum-di-di"s.) Nevertheless, to use such a structure shows her feelings and deep love for poetic language.

The are myriads of details which can be analysed and seen as portents. Take the instance of Beatrice's wedding present to the new bride - a set of books. They fall, due to the viewpoint character's clumsiness, thus breaking a small cupid ornament - which itself was a wedding present to the first Mrs de Winter. Here the symbolism is overt.

The are two "paths" which the narrator can take - both figuratively and literally. One is called "Happy Valley", the other...well here is a description of that one,

"There is no sense of beauty in this undergrowth. That tangle of shrubs there should be cut down to bring light to the path. It was dark much too dark. That naked eucalyptus tree stifled by branches looked like the white bleached limb of a skeleton, and there was a black earthy stream running beneath it, choked with the muddied rains of years, trickling silently to the beach below. The birds did not sing here as they did in the valley. It was quiet in a different way."

Here the author switches between present and past to increase a sense of unease. In other parts of the novel she will use extremely short sentences - not even complete sentences in some cases - to heighten the mood and add a jerkiness and breathlessness to a dramatic situation. There is a very marked instance of this about two thirds the way through the novel after a big "reveal". It is a highly charged emotional episode, and after this the characters behave in a slightly different way, both towards each other and to everyone else, because of their experience.

In certain descriptive passages Du Maurier's language is extremely poetic. The feeling that Manderley is a character rather than just a building, garden and estate was touched on earlier in this review. Manderley is overwhelmingly an organic presence. Much use is made of the pathetic fallacy throughout the novel. Nature is always described as taking on the attributes and feelings of the person experiencing it. Is this deliberate too? Or merely a reflection of what the author felt - her passionate reaction to her beloved Nature in all its apparent moods; Cornwall's unpredictable sea, the cliffs, the gardens and the house.

This quote is typical of the overall feeling of threat and tension in this novel,

"The weather had not broken yet. It was still hot, oppressive. The air was full of thunder and there was rain behind the white dull sky, but it did not fall. I could feel it, and smell it, pent up there, behind the clouds."

This fifth novel really established Daphne Du Maurier's name. Yet it could be argued that she was still to write her best works. "My Cousin Rachel" for instance, her thirteenth major work dating from 1951, has a very similar feel and employs many of the same literary devices. I personally feel she has honed her skills to an even greater and subtler level with that one. (Here is a link to my review of it.)

However, whatever you judge to be the case as regards literary worth, this is a compelling book which once read is never forgotten. Daphne Du Maurier has invested a great deal of herself in this novel - her personality, her own obsessions and her experiences. It is an excellent read on any level, with tension, high drama, intrigue and tragedy. There are a couple of very ingenious twists. And the characters and places have cunningly filtered their way into the public's consciousness as those in all great works do.