275 p. In Four Great Cornish Novels, Gollancz, 1984. First published in 1938.

How does the modern reader review an eighty-five year-old book with a large cultural imprint and a story perhaps familiar from TV or film adaptations? And one on which anyone reading the review may already have formed their own opinions? This is the problem with Rebecca, a book I have come to very late. Is there anything new to say about it?

Its first line “Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again” is of course iconic and astute (or would be to a reader coming to it with no foreknowledge.) The narrator clearly has an attraction to the place but no longer a connection to it. Yet it sets up a mystery. Why is that so? What happened that Manderley is no longer in her life? Why would it be so significant to her? Hence, we read on. I would argue, though, that the rest of that chapter, where we receive the second Mrs de Winter’s memories of its grounds, is a touch too overwritten.

The second chapter begins, “We can never go back again, that much is certain,” once more a promise of revelations to come and perhaps with a more widespread application. Yet such going back, recollections of lives lived from older – maybe wiser – perspectives, is a staple of literature. And so we have the second Mrs de Winter’s account of the early days of her relationship with her now husband, Maxim. Though Maxim de Winter tells her – and us – she has “a lovely and unusual name” we never learn it, which is a bit of a tease and also something of a copout by the author. But it does serve to underline the central thrust of the book. Rebecca, despite its title, is not really her story at all, nor even that of the second Mrs de Winter (except in the fragments we are shown,) but rather of that first wife’s effects on the other characters and of the influence, in an entirely unparanormal way, dead people can exert on the living from beyond the grave.

The mousy, diffident girl Maxim de Winter meets in Monte Carlo due to her paid companionship of Mrs van Hopper (a well-judged portrayal of such a snobby woman and her entitled, selfish behaviour – the blustering Jack Favell, Rebecca’s cousin, who towards the end threatens the promised happy ending, which is itself undone by Manderley’s destruction, is another well-drawn individual) cannot quite believe Maxim’s interest in her – especially since Rebecca’s glamour and allure are all that she hears about. This is perhaps a little disingenuous of du Maurier. Would even the most self-effacing young woman really believe that a man as wealthy as Maxim would marry her solely out of sympathy? And so soon after the death of a woman to whom he was supposedly devoted? That there wasn’t something about her that he found congenial and desirable? That she cannot realise that her difference from Rebecca is the point is much easier to understand. His witholding from her of that information is a mark against him but then without it there would have been no plot. But that leaves our narrator continually holding herself to a standard to which she cannot live up, prey to the machinations of the contemptuous and manipulative housekeeper Mrs Danvers whose devotion to Rebecca survives her mistress’s death. Then again the second Mrs de Winter is largely naïve and too taken up with her own insecurities to see any deeper picture before it is thrust on her.

People have been struck by similarities between Rebecca and Jane Eyre. Both bear characteristics of the Gothic novel, both are the memoirs of a young woman who falls under the spell of an older man with a big house. Yet the comparison is not exact. In Rebecca there is no barrier to marriage, the first Mrs de Winter is dead, in Jane Eyre, Mrs Rochester, the mad woman in the attic, is not – at least until the fire kills her and leaves Mr Rochester blind. However, in Rebecca it is arguable that the mad woman is actually in plain sight in the form of Mrs Danvers. And Jane would not have stood by Mr Rochester if she thought he had got rid of his wife.

No doubt it is due to the book being published in the 1930s but there is a curious lack of passion to the relationship between Maxim and his second wife. Maxim drops into his old habits as soon as he returns to Manderley, leaving his new wife to fend for herself through her long days. There is even a reference to Maxim’s bed being unslept in, their twin beds, then, a clear signal the couple does not sleep together. Love and sex being absent, of the three big novelistic concerns that leaves only death for Rebecca to dwell on.

Pedant’s corner:- Some 1930s usages (to-day, to-night, suit-case.) Otherwise; “reading Bradshaws” (Bradshaw’s,) some commas missing before pieces of direct speech, “lunch I suppose” “the passage was in the past tense” (lunch I supposed,) “Mrs Danvers’ dislike” (Danvers’s,) “the hood” (of a car. That would be the bonnet, then,) the line “pockets. He was staring straight in front of him. He is thinking about Rebecca,” is repeated two lines later and the line it replaces never appears. “‘He was not in a fit to state to undertake anything of the sort” (that first ‘to’ is superfluous.) “It means we had to go” (Again the passage was in past tense; ‘It meant we had to go’,) “Doctor Phillips’ car” (Phillips’s.) “Tired women with crying babies in pram and stared into windows” (is missing something between ‘pram’ and ‘and.’ Or the ‘and’ is superfluous.)

World Books, 1967, 186 p, including 9 p Introduction by Francis Wyndham.

This is the fruit of the author’s fixation with “the mad woman in the attic,” the first Mrs Rochester from Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre. The novel is told in three Parts, the first and third from the viewpoint of the unfortunate Antoinette (or Bertha as her husband calls her,) the second, and much the longest, from his and hers.

The first two Parts are set in the West Indies, where Antoinette, the offspring of a Creole family, was brought up. In Part One she describes her early life. Part Two is the story of her (unnamed in the text) husband’s sojourn in the West Indies, where he and Antoinette married quickly after the illness which followed his arrival, and honeymooned in Dominica. There he receives a letter from a man who claims to be Antoinette’s half-brother, telling him he has been duped into the match as Antoinette is unstable and has a past. This is backed up by the attitude of those in Jamaica who knew her. The marriage is thereby doomed, its failure and her husband’s adultery contribute to Antoinette’s mental decline. Part Three sees our heroine locked up in an attic in England (though she is not entirely sure she is in that country) attended only by a nurse called Grace Poole. Hers and Antoinette’s names along with those of her stepfather and stepbrother are the only overt clues to the connection between this story and Jane Eyre. There are of course other correspondences, however; Antoinette/Bertha’s fascination with fire, her taking advantage of Poole’s falling asleep to roam the wider house, her attack on a man who comes to visit her, but this book is complete in and of itself and could be read with no knowledge of the previous book without any detraction from it.

Wide Sargasso Sea is both a commentary on Jane Eyre and on the ramifications of slavery and its abolition. Its illustration of the inequality of power between men and women also reflects the ending of Brontë’s novel where Jane brings herself to marry Rochester only after he has been blinded, when she has the advantage. There is, however, a kind of opacity to Rhys’s writing which makes it something of a chore to read.

Note to the sensitive; there are many uses of the n-word, but that is true to the times depicted.

Pedant’s corner:- In the Introduction; diststrous (disastrous.) Otherwise – a missing comma before a speech quote (x 3,) a comma missing at the end of a piece of direct speech, cocoanut (nowadays spelled coconut,) “the row of small trees outside my window were covered” (the row …. was covered,) 14 completed thoughts, italicised and in parentheses, mostly of one sentence but some with two, giving us the husband’s thoughts while someone else is speaking to him but only 12 of them had full stops at the end, hynotized (hypnotised,) frangipanni (frangipani; as used earlier.)