This post was originally published at Novelicious.com and is now at WritingTipsOasis.com. WritingTipsOasis.com acquired Novelicious.com in June 2022.
Welcome to the first in our new series in which writers tell us about the book that changed their life. Our first author is the fantastic Eleanor Moran, whose book The Last Time I Saw You is out now. Eleanor tells us why Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier means so much to her.
Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again…
I cannot think of a single opening line that is more memorable and evocative than those first few words from Daphne Du Maurier’s Rebecca. I was fourteen when I first read it – longing for first love, and far too spotty and geeky to find it (a typical writer in waiting, really). Also, perhaps most crucially, I’d grown with a very distant father who I adored, even though I only saw him intermittently. To me, the imperious and unknowable Maxim de Winter seemed like the perfect romantic hero.
The nameless girl who narrates the story spends much of her marriage consumed by jealousy, imagining that Maxim’s black moods are because he’s still in love with his first wife Rebecca, who drowned in mysterious circumstances. Maxim is relentlessly awful to her, and quite possibly gay, judging by the way he files his nails with an emery board and peels a tangerine during the world’s most unromantic proposal. It’s so unromantic that she actually misses it. “I’m asking you to marry me, you little fool” he retorts. Soon they’re ensconced in Manderley, his rambling stately home on the Cornish coast, which he clearly loves far more than either of his wives. He loves it so much in fact that he murders Rebecca to make sure he keeps hold of it.
I couldn’t believe, reading it again in my thirties, how misguided
I’d been back then. I remember my absorption the first time, tears streaming
down my cheeks, hoping that the two of them would get away with hiding the
brutal murder and be allowed to pursue their perfect love. But that said,
although it’s both highly camp and morally dubious, it’s still a truly
wonderful book. It perfectly captures the agony and ecstasy of first love, and
the sense of place – the rugged Cornish coastline where Manderley is perched,
as well as the house itself – is beautifully conveyed.
It also partly inspired my new book, The Last Time I Saw You, in which my heroine, Livvy, ends up fighting her feelings for the widower of her one time best friend, turned enemy, Sally. As she grows closer to William, all the time unravelling the tangled circumstances surrounding Sally’s untimely death in a car crash, she is haunted by the sense that she will never live up to her dead friend’s hold on his heart.
To me, Rebecca Syndrome is a universal experience. Haven’t we all, hopefully in less dramatic circumstances, been left wondering if our partner is secretly comparing us to the girl they left behind? I know I have. Perhaps that’s why Rebecca is such an enduring classic, adapted for the screen time and time again. I know for me that I can always still while away a cold winter’s day lost in its pages.