Rebecca

[NellyBluth]

I've just started reading this again. I always thought I loved this book, but this time around I'm not so sure. I don't think I like Maxim - he doesn't seem to have many redeeming features. And the narrator seems even more of a drip this time around, which is quite possibly the point.

Do you love Rebecca or hate it?

And what do you imagine the narrator's name to be? I used to think it was something like Amelia or Emilia, but I suspect that was because Emilia Fox played her the adaptation that I saw . But reading again I can't help but think it is something related to flowers, given the preponderance of flower imagery in the book.

I am sure it says her name is supposed to be normally a masculine name. I wondered Lesley?

The only thing it really mentions about her name is that it is "lovely and unusual", and that Maxim manages to spell it correctly when he sends her a note at the hotel in Monte, which apparently doesn't happen often.

I do love how everyone seems to have read the book with a name in their head though!

Fire, that is a great point. The narrator has absolutely no influence whatsoever on events; she could be invisible and the story would pretty much continue exactly as it does.

I just found it too hard to read without getting increasingly frustrated that the narrator doesn't just put her foot down a little and manage the house, or tell Maxim how she feels. Not that I can understand why she'd want to, she's getting bloody nothing out of the marriage as it is! He's awful. Morally and romantically Maxim has absolutely nothing going for him (well, bar a large house and a huge fortune). And Mrs Danvers wasn't remotely scary this time around.

I've just started Rebecca's Tale again. I remember enjoying the book first time around and I think I'm going to enjoy it again, but I have to admit that the leap the author has taken in making Colonel Julyan so close to Maxim and Rebecca is a bit of a stretch. An understandable one, though, as she needed someone from the original book to include but.

Love this book . First read it as a teenager and still reread my original copy 40 years later .
It resonates with me so much in Du Mauriers descriptions of the landscape around Manderley . I can be walking in woods and hear the pigeons fluttering and find wild azaleas ............a woodland walk down to a startling view of a lake [not the sea sadly ] ..............a ruined house sitting silently somewhere with ivy and nature reclaiming ownership . Then I find myself mutter those first words to myself

Her name ? Always thought it to be something Latin based for some reason . Cordelia . I empathised with her gaucheness [and that lank hair ].

Maxim says to her
You have a beautiful and unusual name
She replies
My father was a beautiful and unusual person

On the next page maxim says

You know I said you have a beautiful and and unusual name. it becomes you as it did your father

I take this to mean she was named after her father which is why it is probably a more masculine name. Maybe it had changed the spelling to feminise it.

I only read Rebecca for the first time a year or two ago and I absolutely loved it, but I'm afraid to re-read it in case it's not as perfect as I first thought.

I'm also afraid to read Susan Hill's 'Mrs De-Winter' in case it's awful.

I read My Cousin Rachel earlier this year and didn't like it nearly so much.

I LOVE it - I have lost count of the number of times I have re read it.

Maxim's an emotionally manipulative cunt. I wish there had been a sequel in which 'the second Mrs de Winter' grows up, realises she's wasting her time with a twisted, sick arsewipe, leaves him and gets a name!

Ex-pat, perhaps you should write it? I would read it, that's for sure!

Maybe her name is Leander.