欧宝娱乐

I can't recall what possessed me to bump Daphne du Maurier's 1938 Gothic mystery so far up my reading list. Rebecca was the source material for the Academy Award winning Best Picture of 1940, directed by Alfred Hitchcock and starring Joan Fontaine & Laurence Olivier, a film I recall being visually stunning but very un-Hitchcockian in its plot development. It had more in common with Gone With the Wind than Strangers on a Train. My urge to give more female authors an honest read and to find something to write glowing reviews about won out.

Judging by this novel, I couldn't be a more ardent fan of du Maurier's.

Rebecca begins with a sentence that's as airtight as it is intoxicating: "Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again." The story is the first-person account of a naive and unsophisticated girl who, in the first of several bold moves by the author, is never revealed by her Christian name, only later as "Mrs. de Winter" or "the second Mrs. de Winter". She's an escort for an obnoxious American woman vacationing in Monte Carlo. The girl's employer attaches herself to any hotel guest she recognizes from the society pages and makes a victim of an English widower named Maximilian de Winter, heir to an estate in the West Country known as Manderley, a place, everyone agrees, of dreams.

Though twice her age, de Winter is as drawn to the girl's innocence as she is his gentleness and experience. Not many afternoons in Monte Carlo pass between the time he permits her to call him "Maxim" and he offers to take her away from her dreadful employer by becoming his wife. The couple return to Manderley, where Mrs. de Winter is overwhelmed by the house with its unoccupied rooms, its staff willing to cater to her every need and neighbors requesting a social call. She immediately feels the scorn of housekeeper Mrs. Danvers, a cold hearted bitch she is certain intends to destroy her.

Rebecca is a ghost story in which no visitations from beyond the grave occur. The second Mrs. de Winter is haunted by her predecessor, a combination of beauty, brains and breeding who drowned in a boating accident but lives in every furniture arrangement and in the eyes of everyone she meets at Manderley. Mrs. Danvers does rank as one of the great antagonists of literature, her battle of wills with the second Mrs. de Winter as one-sided as a cat playing with a mouse, but it is Rebecca who proves to be the force threatening the couple. I was surprised to find myself rooting for the protagonists to vanquish Rebecca and live happily ever after. Shocking how great writing can reduce me to a 16-year-old girl.

Du Maurier has a terrific ear for dialogue and propels the story forward using a lot of it, which I always think is great. Her prose is as intoxicating as it is concise, detailing the landscapes and rooms her characters move through with lush confidence and without turning the book into a furniture catalog. Manderley is based on a Cornwall estate known as Menabilly that du Maurier became obsessed with, but instead of writing a history of the estate or the relics who lived there, she focuses on a new arrival, a rube who must pass muster and conquer her fear of the house or risk being driven out and destroyed by it. I liked that.

I also liked how du Maurier doesn't force a conventional whodunit on the reader. Mrs. de Winter doesn't assert herself into the story as much as a contemporary heroine might. The plot materializes around her in a very effecting way. Her motivation is to make her marriage work and keep her husband happy. If she fails, she risks going back into the world where she has fewer opportunities to survive. In addition to examining what more marriages were like before women's lib, this aspect to the story elevated the tension supremely well. I'll be elevating more of du Maurier's fiction to the top of my reading list.