Rebecca in Our Shared Shelf

Mar 08, 2021 Miss Susan rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: audio

daphne du maurier walking into the club like what up; i will write a book with characters SO unlikeable

(to be clear i'm not calling it a flaw! it was clearly on purpose. it did make the book hard going till the twist came along and the story really got moving though)

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Sep 10, 2023 Alejandra rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

On the surface, "Rebecca" looks like a gothic romance: after a brief courtship in Monte Carlo, a young woman of modest means marries a wealthy widower, but once they settle in his estate in England, their happiness is threatened by the shadow of his former wife. Dig a little deeper, and this is a deliberately paced masterful character exploration of two women: one that is there but isn't, and one that is gone and prevails, both defined by their role in their household.

The story is told from the On the surface, "Rebecca" looks like a gothic romance: after a brief courtship in Monte Carlo, a young woman of modest means marries a wealthy widower, but once they settle in his estate in England, their happiness is threatened by the shadow of his former wife. Dig a little deeper, and this is a deliberately paced masterful character exploration of two women: one that is there but isn't, and one that is gone and prevails, both defined by their role in their household.

The story is told from the perspective of the new wife. She is introverted and not particularly confident; her struggles to adapt to her marriage are not helped by her naivete and her proneness to creating whole stories in her head that keep her from standing up for herself and taking action. The character is also never named in what appear to be an intentional oversight - she might as well not have a name given how little agency she has and how much room the former wife, Rebecca, occupies. Rebecca, through the eyes of the main character, is everything she is not - extroverted, easy to like, confident and elegant. Even after her death, her presence is large - the household continues to run just the same, with the flowers she liked being placed in the spot she preferred and her bedroom remains untouched, just as it was the day she died. We get a very vivid picture of this headstrong woman, but this picture may not resemble the real Rebecca. Our narrator is unreliable, she lives in her head. The Rebecca we see is fabricated by both the main character and her biased husband, yet she inhabits the pages and makes them her own. (view spoiler)

A gothic novel wouldn't be one without a gloomy estate, and we got Manderley (I feel I'm missing out on a lot of excitement by not having named our house). The story is set in a lavish house surrounded by a riot of plants and close to an inclement sea, a house filled with nooks and crannies for people with secrets to linger on. Of course there are secrets.
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