Rebecca

I love Rebecca - read it first at 18 and still love it at 36!
Don't like Maxim especially, but I do love how you can be totally rooting for a murderer (on her behalf, if you see what i mean). In any normal circumstances, I'd be horrified by him not wanting him to escape justice!
Wasn't over-fond of Rebecca's Tale, but then I don't like books, on the whole, that piggy-back off others - I could just about tolerate Wide Sargasso Sea but mostly I think "Oh, for goodness sake, get your own idea and let me imagine for myself where Rebecca came from. Don't take away the mystery of her."

Oh yes, Rebecca far more interesting than the new Mrs de winter and the emotionally defunct maxim.

I want a cabin on the beach with lovers who come and go in the moonlight.

Loved Rebecca's tale too, especially the super bonkers Danny in London. Mrs de winter still a drip though.

I read it a couple of years ago for the first time - I liked it but didn't quite understand why it was a desert-island read for so many women. I think the attraction of the story is sod all to do with Maxim (I wouldn't even have been able to tell you his name), he's kind of incidental to the whole thing and their relationship seems paper thin: it's all about Mrs Danvers's passion for Rebecca, almost Heathcliffe-like in its intensity and destruction.

I'm sure the narrator had a name that would have screamed out her petit-bourgeois origins for the whole of the Cornish set to sneer at and made it impossible for her be accepted as the rightful Mrs de Winter: Joyce perhaps? Marjorie?

That sounds interesting, I'll look it up.

I must add Rebecca to my re-read list. I read it as a teenager and loved it. I don't know whether I still will.

Have you read The Secrets Between Us by Louise Douglas? It's in my tbr pile. Apparently it's very similar in plot to Rebecca (intentionally, according to her interview with Richard & Judy).

I love it, but not unconditionally.

Maxim is a bit of a twerp, isn't he? He certainly wouldn't have won me over with his car shenanigans at the beginning. YY to the narrator being a drip; even when she grow a spine she didn't get rid of Mrs Danvers? I find the short sentences a little annoying as well.

Nevertheless, its a rattling good read and, first and foremost, Daphne Du Maurier deserves admiration for telling a fine story with a tight, gripping plot.

*I always think of the narrator as being called Barbary - I was 9 when I first read it and thought that would be a lovely, exotic name

I could never get past the first couple of chapters without being bored rigid.
I have however read Rebecca's Tale by Sally Beuman with great enjoyment. I know that probably means that I should be be hung drawn and quartered from a literary standpoint but I just cannot help the fact I found it a much more engaging book!

Love love love this book. But I agree with you about the characters. I like your flower name idea. How about Primmie, short for Primrose? She is indeed a prim rose to Rebecca's wild rhododendron.