Rebecca

"It’s a novel that uses the narrative form of the psychological thriller, but in the service of exploring a single emotion: jealousy. It’s a simple set up: the unnamed narrator is newly married to the mysterious Maxim de Winter. “The real love story in the novel is between Mrs Danvers and Rebecca” Installed at his estate, Manderlay, she slowly becomes obsessed by his first wife, Rebecca. One reason why the thriller-like aspects of the novel are so successful is because the flattening of narrative goes hand in hand with the flattening of perspective when in the grips of jealousy. She is—she’s terrifying, but she’s also a character who is suffering for love. It seems clear that the real love story in the novel is between Mrs Danvers and Rebecca. Landscape is important, and du Maurier uses it brilliantly—not least because the landscape of Manderlay is one that represents power and the accrual of capital. Among other things, the novel is about class, and how those divisions regulate who is inside and who is outside—and by extension, who wants to serve from inside, and who wants to burn it all down."

"This a modern – well, 1930s – version of Jane Eyre . In the grand tradition of Gothic novels , it features an innocent young woman and a scary house with secrets. The heroine marries a widowed Englishman and moves into his mansion, where the servants are still mourning his stunning first wife, Rebecca. Throughout the story, she feels the first wife haunt the house, and she can never quite measure up to her. And then the heroine begins to wonder: What if Rebecca was murdered? What if my husband did it? Yes, it is a little bit like [Akira Kurosawa’s film] Rashomon in that you look at this dead woman from different points of view. The housekeeper Mrs Danvers sees the late Rebecca as a queen, an object of total worship. The heroine sees her as a flawless and beautiful ideal that she can never match up to. Then you find out that, from the husband’s point of view, Rebecca was in fact a monster. The exploration of who this dead woman really was, and whether her husband might have killed her. That’s the underlying theme for a lot of good crime novels – the unknowable person. We all walk around with a public face, but we don’t really know what is underneath that mask. Crime fiction is about finding out who the real person is."

"Who doesn’t like it? Probably the main thing about Rebecca that I find completely compelling is the way that you, the reader, become complicit in a situation which, eventually, turns into a crime. It’s incredibly subtle, the way you’re drawn into this world. You’re blind—you’re as blind as the unnamed narrator—and you’re drawn in step-by-step-by-step until you’re so deeply in it that you are complicit in the result. I won’t say more as I don’t want to give away the plot. But I think that’s one of the reasons that it succeeds so brilliantly: it’s that you are involved, you become almost a character in the book. I first read it when I was about 15 and I loved it for the atmosphere and the creepiness of it. I’ve read it since then, a couple of times. As an adult, the things that I admire about it are the cleverness of it, the setup, the fact that the narrator is never named, her development as a character, and then this massive absence-presence of Rebecca herself. Rebecca just dominates in her absence—more than any present character ever could. I find that really interesting, as a writer."

"It's so good! It has one of the great opening lines in literature ('Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again') and the rest of the book is as good as that line."

"Last summer I revisited "Jane Eyre," "Wuthering Heights" and "Rebecca" in a back-to-back swoop. All three were even better, smarter and more suspenseful than I had remembered."

"I did recently talk up Daphne du Maurier's "Rebecca" and "The Incredible Painting of Felix Clousseau," which is a picture book by Jon Agee. Both of those books are full of tragic shenanigans and have perfect endings."

""The Woman in White," by Wilkie Collins. Runner-up, "Rebecca," by Daphne du Maurier."