There is a final twist to Rebecca and it is a covert one. Maxim de Winter kills not one wife, but two. He murders the first with a gun, and the second by slower, more insidious methods. The second Mrs de Winter’s fate, for which she prepares herself throughout the novel, is to be subsumed by her husband. Following him into that hellish exile glimpsed in the opening chapters, she becomes again what she was when she first met him – the paid companion to a petty tyrant. For humouring his whims, and obeying his every behest, her recompense is not money, but ‘love’ – and the cost is her identity.
Brilliant afterword
