An audio book. "Last night I dreamed I went to Mandelay again" is the first sentence. The narrator's in a small hotel overlooking vineyards. She dreams that the country house has been overtaken by nature. She flashblacks.
When she was 21, Mrs van Hopper's paid companion in a Monte Carlo hotel, her boss (an old american social climber) cornered Mr de Winter, 42, into conversation. His family had lived in Mandelay for centuries - Ethelred got the nickname "the unready" while staying there. While van Hooper's bedridden with flu for a fortnight the narrator spends mornings with de Winter, who asks her to marry him, and quickly. Max is a widower, his first wife Rebecca drowning in a boat accident by the house.
They marry and honeymoon in Venice before going to Mandelay. She feels an imposter there. Mrs Danvers, who runs the house, thinks so too. But Max's sister Beatrice is friendly. The narrator likes the happy valley that leads to the sea and a deserted cottage. She spends time with Jasper the dog. She meets Ben, the simple-minded fisherman. She learns about Rebecca, how there were so many parties in those days. Will she live up to people's expectations?
The house (one wing redecorated for her), the garden, the sea, the countryside all reflect moods. She prefers their relationship as it was in Italy.
She's assessed by guests. "how different you are" they say. She's aware of things unsaid. She explores. She doesn't want to be treated as young and shy. She's repeatedly asked if she likes hunting. She sketches a little, that's all.
A social faux-pas leads to a confidence crisis, tides of inadequacy. She feels comfortable with agent Roger and Felix the dog, and being alone. Max is moody - he wasn't, allegedly, with Rebecca. She returns early to the house when it's empty except for Mrs Danvers and a male guest (Jack Favelle, who turns out to be Rebecca's relative). Mrs Danvers shows the narrator the bedroom she's kept as a shrine to Rebecca. She knows that the narrator's been poking around already.
They host a grand fancy-dress ball. It's an ordeal for her - partly because her costume reminds Max of Rebecca. She feels she can fight the living but she can't compete with the dead. She confronts Mrs Danvers, who's still besotted with Rebecca who she nursed as a girl. Danvers says (with admiration) that Rebecca brought lovers to the house. Mrs Danvers tempts the narrator to jump out of the high window they're beside.
New evidence emerges about Rebecca's boating "accident" - it was suicide or murder. Max tells the narrator that he never loved Rebecca, that he knew she had many lovers (almost anyone). He says that he killed her. He regrets thereby stealing the narrator's innocence. The narrator is glad that she's growing up.
Favelle threatens to blackmail Max. The local magistrate investigates, and discovers that Rebecca had terminal cancer, which convinces Favelle that he doesn't have a case. So will it be happy ever after for the couple? At the end Mandelay seems to be on fire. Mrs Danvers?
I liked chapter 15's visit to the grandmother. I liked the shaped passages, the flow of thought.
- however many [daffodils] you might pick there was no thinning of the rank ... bluebells ... made a challenge to the sky. He never would have them in the house, he said, thrust into vases they became dank and listless ... People who plucked bluebells from the woods were vandals. He had forbidden it at Mandelay. Sometimes, driving in the country he had seen bicyclists with huge bunches strapped before them on their handles, the bloom already fading from the dying heads, the ravaged stalks straggling naked and unclean. The primrose did not mind it quite so much and preened and smiled in a jam-jar in some cottage window without resentment
- the silence became minutes, and the minutes became miles
- the bustle and finality of departure, the sound of the car changing gear as it turned the corner and then even that sound merging into the common traffic and being lost and so absorbed for ever
I like her what-ifs - when her her husband drives away, she imagines an accident and a funeral, replete with telling detail.
The pathetic fallacies are sometimes a little stifling.
Other reviews
- Olivia Liang (Amazingly, the reader is somehow manipulated or cajoled into believing her murder and its concealment are somehow necessary, even romantic; that being cuckolded is a far worse fate than a woman’s death. ... But who is really punished, and for what? Rebecca has a disturbingly circular structure ... As Margaret Forster’s revelatory 1993 biography made clear, Du Maurier had been like that since childhood, always dreaming up other possibilities, never certain that people, or even time, were as stable as they seemed. She certainly wasn’t. From a very young age she was what she called a “half-breed”, female on the outside “with a boy’s mind and a boy’s heart”.)
- theconversation
- goodreads
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