Rebecca

Five stars for crafting intense interest and presence with a character who never appears. Also, I think if I hadn't seen the movie this would have been a compelling page-turner.

But the narrator wears on one after a while, and I felt like this would have been better if shorter.

Actually, I would have been more interested if I'd read the background information on the author before reading the novel. More analysis and reflection on my part about her polar depiction of What a Woman Should Be would have lent a lot of texture to the read.

Rebecca was a surprising read and not the type of story I'm usually drawn to. At this time I've been reading a lot of horror and looking for something with more substance; classics with a pedigree. Rebecca is not a scary supernatural story. There are no literal ghosts or hauntings that take place in the book. The story is hard to pin down, since it contains aspects of a gothic English manor romance, mystery, thriller and ultimate tragedy. No, though the haunting is not literal, the dominant presence of the dead first wife of Maxim de Winter, Rebecca, lingers and saturates everything within and without the Manderley estate. Told from a future period looking back, Maxim's, at the time of their marriage, unnamed new wife, and narrator of the story, is half the age of the forty-two-year-old widower. Rescued from the life as a paid companion to a disgusting, social-climbing, American matron in a Monte Carlo whirlwind romance, the young Mrs. de Winter is the complete opposite of Rebecca. She finds that trying to fill the shoes of the deceased Rebecca as lady of the manor is an intimidating task and her new secretive husband is often cold and aloof and not the husband and lover she had hoped for. And then there is the head servant, Mrs. Danvers, like the grim reaper, dressed in black, with a skull-like face who had been an intimate friend and companion to Rebecca growing up. She will be a frightening enemy to the mousy and impressionable new Mrs. De Winter. It is through the young Mrs. De Winter's constant internal, daydreamed scenarios that a haunting portrait of Rebecca is fleshed out. But such imaginative wool gathering can never be relied upon to paint a truly accurate picture of such an overpowering figure gone and never met. And, even in death, the young bride will find that Rebecca can reach out from the grave to stir up trouble for the newlywed couple.