Last night I reached for an old favourite once more...

It’s more than 20 years since I first read it, but I find myself returning to Daphne du Maurier’s 1938 novel Rebecca again and again. Although it’s only about 12 months since I last read it, I thought, why not pick it up again once more? We are in the uncharted waters of the coronavirus lockdown, and reading this old favourite reminds me of a life before social distancing and talk of pandemics. For me, it’s a matter of self-care.

In any case, I still get a thrill from trying to trace how Du Maurier pulls it off. I think part of me goes back to being a 19-year-old who’s heavily invested in the story of a gauche young woman being saved from the dreaded fate of spinsterhood by a dashing white knight figure.

During that first reading all those years ago, I left ‘my’ copy (actually a hardback version from the mobile library) of the gothic novel at home, so – finding myself with 20 minutes to kill in town – I slipped into Eason’s, found another copy of the novel, tracked down the point at which I’d stopped reading, and quietly read a few pages until it was time to catch the bus. That’s how much of a hold the story had over me.

Movie poster for Rebecca (1940)

Now that I’m older and a little wiser, a large part of me marvels at how a straightforward romance plot goes so rapidly off the rails and becomes a work that touches on themes of jealousy, identity, youth, and how the past becomes refracted as it is represented in the here and now.

In recent years, I’ve also had to confront the suspicion that Rebecca herself may actually be… kind of a legend.

Although we never meet her, we learn about her through the eyes of the narrator, the second Mrs De Winter. It’s a handy device deployed by Du Maurier, that Rebecca is cast as a sophisticated, accomplished woman of the world who is admired and adored by everybody who meets her.

It’s doubly beguiling as we ‘see’ Rebecca through the guileless eyes of the unworldly and relatively innocent second Mrs De Winter, who is perpetually comparing herself to the perfection of her predecessor and consistently finds herself falling short.

(One of the delights of the book is that returning to the novel repays huge dividends. Every sentence that relates to Rebecca before the pivotal scene in which the second Mrs de Winter discovers the fate of Maxim’s first wife merits rereading, just to watch a master craftswoman like Du Maurier at work.)

Joan Fontaine as the second Mrs De Winter and Judith Anderson as Mrs Danvers in Hitchcock's 1940 movie, Rebecca

Even when the scales fall from our eyes, and we learn that Rebecca led a louche lifestyle, thumbing her nose at staid old Max’s old-fashioned attitudes at every opportunity, the modern reader may find themselves… intrigued, rather than aghast at her antics.

After all, Rebecca is living her life on her own terms. She’s rejecting the constraints of a patriarchal society in seeking sexual fulfilment wherever she can find it. She forges an identity of her own through the curation of Manderley as a stately home of some reknown. She hits the London party scene when she wants to, and takes lovers out for jaunts on her sailing boat from Manderley whenever she feels like it.

This line of thinking hits the buffers pretty quickly: Rebecca is a vile woman, something that is telegraphed from early on. She was habitually and needlessly cruel to childlike Ben, who is continues to be terrorised by his memories of her long after Rebecca’s exit. And we learn that Rebecca treated animals brutally and relished manipulating the people around her. She appears to foster that classic sociopathic tendency to treat other people as if they are simply supporting actors in the movie of their lives.

Meanwhile, Maxim certainly doesn’t appeal to the modern reader, getting away with murdering his first wife, and selecting for his second wife an innocent young woman who will challenge neither his authority nor his morality.

I’m intrigued to see how the new production of Rebecca, due out sometime in 2020 and starring Lily James and Armie Hammer (and Kristin Scott Thomas as Mrs Danvers), will handle Maxim’s paternalistic, yet listless, impulses towards his young bride.

Laurence Olivier as Maxim de Winter and Joan Fontaine as the second Mrs de Winter in Rebecca (1940)

But how much latitude with contemporary morality did Du Maurier allow herself? If you know anything about Daphne du Maurier, it is that her own sexuality was not clearcut and she was privileged enough to enjoy a certain amount of liberation from the mores of the early 20th century. In writing for a popular fiction audience in the 1930s, surely even hinting at Rebecca’s licentious lifestyle was taking a gamble – not to mention Maxim’s devastating confession to his second wife and the manner in which his unimpeachable position in society leads to his walking free.

And how much fun must Du Maurier have had in creating the character of Rebecca? In not only outlining her character, but of portraying the effect her personality had on those people who surround her? How skilful a writer must Du Maurier have been to ably illustrate these traits on the double? In a way that casts Rebecca in a positive light on first reading, and then in a negative aspect on subsequent readings?

Anyway, I’ll get back to reacquainting myself with the delightfully vulgar Mrs Van Hopper and bracing myself for the encounters with the disturbingly ghoulish Mrs Danvers.

Do you have books that you return to time and time again? Have you found yourself rereading old favourites during the coronavirus lockdown? And do you have any book suggestions that are as creepily unsettling? Please let me know...

Daphne du Maurier in 1930