Daphne du Maurier: "Rebecca"
The book
In Monte Carlo a young, shy woman meets the cultivated and older widower Maxim de Winter. She is attracted to him and pushes his attacks of melancholy on the death of his wife Rebecca, who died in a boating accident. When he makes her a marriage proposal within a week, is she surprised? but overjoyed. After a lavish honeymoon, the couple returns to de Winter's manor Manderley in Cornwall. As he looks after the administration of the property again, his love seems to abate. And the new Mrs. de Winter has to realize that her predecessor is still uncannily present throughout the house. Close to despair, does she come behind the dark secret of Manderley? and that of her husband. Daphne du Maurier's atmospherically dense novel is a classic: psychologically skilful, it tells the story of a great, destructive love.
A dark secret, a destructive love, exciting to the furious end. A classic.
The author
Daphne du Maurier (1907-1989) published her first novel at the age of 24 and is one of the most popular women writers worldwide. Your novel "Rebecca" was, like her short story "The Birds" by Alfred Hitchcock congenially filmed and received in 1940 an Oscar as "best movie". In 1969 she was knighted by the English Queen for her services to literature.
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Read sample "Rebecca"
Last night I dreamed that I was back in Manderley. I saw myself standing by the iron gate of the driveway, and at first I could not get in, for the way was closed to me. Castle and chain hung at the gate. I dreamed after the porter and got no answer, and when I peered through the rusty bars, I saw that the gatehouse was uninhabited.
No smoke rose from the chimney, and the little windows slid open. Then, like all dreamers, I suddenly had supernatural powers, and like a disembodied being I passed the obstacle. In front of me the driveway squirmed, twisted and twisted as it had from time immemorial, but as I walked on I realized that something had changed; the way was not the one we had known; he was slim and unkempt.
At first that confused me, and I did not understand it. And it was only when I had to dodge my head with a branch swinging down that I realized what had happened. Nature had come to her right again; without haste, in her quiet, secretive way she had gradually spread the long way with long clinging fingers on the way. The forest, which had once been a menacing danger, had finally managed to win. Silently, his trees penetrated ever closer to the limit. Buchen tended their gray-white bare trunks against each other, entwining their branches in a strange embrace, and built a vault over my head like the archway of a church.
The approach was a narrow band, a thin thread in comparison to the past, the gravel disappeared, suffocated by grass and moss. The trees stretched out low branches that inhibited the step; her gnarled roots protruded like death-claws. Here and there I recognized bushes in this jungle: hydrangeas whose blue heads had been a celebrity. No hand had trimmed them, they were feral and now rose blooms to giant size, black and ugly like the nameless weed next to them.
Farther, farther, soon to the east, now to the west, the miserable path that once had been our driveway wound. Sometimes I thought he had disappeared completely now, but he reappeared, perhaps, or perhaps laboriously, clambering up the edge of a muddy ditch, which the winter rains had washed out, behind a fallen tree. I did not think that the way was so long. The miles must have multiplied, just as the trees had done, and that path led to a labyrinth, a stifled wilderness, but not to the house. I suddenly stood in front of it; the unrestrained jungle of thickets had blocked my vision, and I stood there, my heart pounding in my chest, and I felt the pain of swelling tears in my eyes.
There was Manderley, our Manderley, silent, secretive as it had always been; the gray stone shimmered in the light of my dream moon, the high two-part windows reflected the lawn green, the terrace.Time could not destroy the perfect symmetry of those walls, and not the harmony of the situation? a gem in an open hand. The terrace fell to the lawns, and the lawns stretched toward the sea, and as I turned, I recognized the silvery expanse, serenely under the moon like a lake, untouched by wind and storm. No waves would ever disturb this dream sea, no cloud wall from the west could eclipse the clarity of this pale sky.
I turned back to the house, and even if it were unscathed, untouched, as if we had left it yesterday? I saw that even the garden had been obedient to the law of the jungle. Perched and tangled with thorny shrubs, the rhododendron bushes rose and made unnatural weddings with the mass of nameless shrubs clinging to their roots. A lilac-tree had united with a beech-tree, and to bind them even closer together, the malicious ivy, always an enemy of grace, had wrapped its tentacles around the couple, never to release it again. The ivy dominated this lost garden; the long tendrils crept across the lawn, and soon they would take possession of the house. Nettles grew everywhere, the advance troop of the enemy flocks. They flooded the terrace, lounging on the lanes, mean and unrestrained, even leaning against the windows of the house. They did not do much to guard duty, however, because in many places the rhubarb bush was already breaking through its ranks, and with their heads crushed and their stalks weak, they lay on the ground where rabbits had made a path. I left the drive and climbed onto the terrace; The nettles in my dream offered me no obstacle, I walked enchanted, and nothing stopped me.
The moonlight can play strange tricks on imagination, even the imagination of a dreamer. As I stood there still, with restrained breath, I could have sworn that the house was not merely an empty shell, but animated and animated, as it had formerly lived.
The windows were brightly lit, the curtains billowed softly in the night wind, and there, in the library, was still the half-open door that we had forgotten to close, and my handkerchief lay on the table next to the vase of autumn roses. Everything in the room had yet to eloquently speak of our presence: the small pile of books from the library, drawn as read, to be set back again; and the old numbers of the Times; Ashtray with crushed cigarette stubs; the crumpled pillows in the chairs, which still bore the imprint of our heads; the charred glow of our wood fire, which smolderingly awaited the morning; and Jasper, our dear Jasper, with his expressive eyes and heavy, drooping lips, was still stretched out in front of the fireplace, tapping his tail on the floor as he always did when he heard his master's footsteps.
A cloud had come up unseen, covering the moon for a moment. With him the windows extinguished; the dream had vanished, and the voice of the past no longer whispered around the staring walls.
The house was a tomb of our hopes, and our sufferings were buried in the ruins. There was no resurrection. If I thought of Manderley by day, the thoughts would not be bitter.
I would think back to how it could have been if I had been there without fear. I would remember the summer rose garden, the bird's nest in the early morning; as we drank the tea under the chestnut tree and the whispering of the sea came up from below across the lawns to us. I would remember the flowering lilac and our happy valley. These things were permanent, they could not pass away; these memories did not hurt.
