Working as a lady’s companion, the heroine of Rebecca learns her place. Her future looks bleak until, on a trip to the South of France,she meets Max de Winter, a handsome widower whose sudden proposal of marriage takes her by surprise. She accepts, but whisked from glamorous Monte Carlo to the ominous and brooding Manderley, the new Mrs de Winter finds Max a changed man.And the memory of his dead wife Rebecca is forever kept alive by the forbidding housekeeper, Mrs Danvers...
Not since Jane Eyre has a heroine faced such difficulty with the Other Woman. An international bestseller that has never gone out of print, Rebecca is the haunting story of a young girl consumed by love and the struggle to find her identity.
Rebecca, first published in 1938, was Daphne du Maurier’s fifth novel. It was to become the most famous of her many books; over sixty years later, it continues to haunt,fascinate and perplex a new generation of readers.Yet its enduring popularity has not been matched by critical acclaim: Rebecca,from the time of first publication, has been woefully and wilfully underestimated. It has been dismissed as a gothic romance, as women’s fiction’- with such prejudicial terms, of course, giving clues as tO why the novel has been so unthinkingly misinter-preted. Re-examination of this strange, angry and prescient novel is long overdue. A re-appraisal of it should begin, perhaps, with the circumstances under which it was written.
Du Maurier began planning it at a difficult point in her life:only a few years had passed since the death of her adored but dominating father, the actor-manager Gerald du Maurier. She was pregnant with her second child when at the planning stage of the book, and, by the time she actually began writing, at the age of thirty, she was in Egypt, where her husband, Frederick Browning, an officer in the Grenadier Guards, had been posted with his battalion. What many would regard as the quintessential Cornish novel was therefore begun, and much of it written,not in Cornwall, not even in England, but in the fierce heat of an Egyptian summer, in a city du Maurier came to loathe:Alexandria.
