SOURCE: “Rereading Rebecca,” in New Yorker, November 8, 1993, pp. 127–38.

[In the following review of Daphne du Maurier, Beauman urges a reconsideration of Daphne du Maurier's oeuvre and place in English literature.]

Rebecca, first published in 1938, was Daphne du Maurier's fifth novel. She began planning it at a difficult point in her life: it was only a few years after the death of her adored but dominating father, the actor-manager Gerald du Maurier, she was pregnant with her second child; and by the time she actually began writing, at the age of thirty, she was in Egypt, where her husband, Frederick A. M. (Boy) Browning, an officer in the Grenadier Guards, had been posted with his battalion. Du Maurier loathed Alexandria—her longing for England, and in particular for Cornwall, was, she wrote, like “a pain under the heart continually”—and she loathed the role forced upon her in Egypt by her marriage. Shy and socially reclusive, she hated the small talk and the endless receptions she was expected to give and to attend as a commanding officer's wife. Her homesickness and her resentment of these wifely duties, together with a guilty sense of her own ineptitude when performing them, were elements she incorporated into Rebecca. She began writing it in the appalling heat of an Egyptian summer just a few months after the birth of her child and, after a false start she described as a “literary miscarriage,” finally completed it on her return to England in the spring of the following year.

Du Maurier had already had some success as an author: her biography of her father, Gerald: A Portrait, had been well received by critics, and her novel about Cornish wreckers, Jamaica Inn, had been a best-seller; her publisher, Victor Gollancz, was eager for another. On receiving Rebecca, Gollancz was jubilant; a “rollicking success” was forecast by him, by his senior editor, and by everyone to whom advance copies were sent. Prior to publication, du Maurier's was the only dissenting voice: she saw Rebecca as “psychological and rather macabre” and “a bit on the gloomy side,” and she felt the ending was “a bit grim.” Aware of the amount of money Gollancz was spending on promotion, she became anxious, fearing an “awful flop.” Gollancz dismissed her fears, and it was he who was proved correct. Rebecca, touted to booksellers for its “exquisite love-story” and its “brilliantly created atmosphere of suspense”—in short, promoted and sold as a gothic romance—became an immediate and overwhelming commercial success.

The novel went through twenty-eight printings in four years in Britain alone. It became a huge best-seller for du Maurier's United States publisher, Doubleday. It sold in vast numbers throughout Europe. And it continues to sell to this day: it has never been out of print in the fifty-five years since its publication. The scale of the novel's success in terms of sales is impossible to determine, for no cumulative figures exist, but at this level exact figures become unimportant. What is clear is that Rebecca long ago ceased to be merely a novel. Like Margaret Mitchell's Gone with the Wind (published two years earlier), Rebecca has made the strange and risky transformation from best-seller to cult to legend.

These two novels, unique in this century in popular fiction for their continuing fascination and réclame, could scarcely be more different. Gone with the Wind is a saga, painted with broad strokes on a huge canvas; Rebecca is brief, apparently narrow in focus, a nervy, dreamlike passage through the consciousness of its female narrator. Yet both novels are about women and property, Tara being the property of a father and Manderley that of a husband; and both concern themselves with female archetypes—with the polarity between the “good” and the “bad” woman (or the “Healer” and the “Destroyer,” as du Maurier termed them). There are other points of coincidence, too, in their progress to their present, mythologized status. Both novels were produced as films by David Selznick, within a year of each other, and both the films won Oscars. (Rebecca won the award for best picture; Alfred Hitchcock, its director, did not receive an Oscar, though he created a haunting, eerie, and intuitive version of the book, which he was later to dismiss as a mere “novelette.”) Both films did much to widen the readership of the novels on which they were based, and continue to do so; and both novels, as their fame increased, launched a secondary journalistic and literary industry, an avalanche of interviews, speculation, interpretation, and commentary. Neither Mitchell nor du Maurier welcomed this. Mitchell, who published only the one novel and died young, suffered the onslaught for thirteen years; du Maurier, the author of thirty-seven books, suffered it for more than fifty years, which is to say for the rest of her life.

Du Maurier died in Cornwall in 1989, shortly before her eighty-second birthday, and this brings us to the final resemblance in the history of the two novels and the two women: after du Maurier's death, as after Mitchell's, the literary industry attendant on her, far from dwindling, increased. This year sees the publication of the first authorized du Maurier biography, Daphne du Maurier: The Secret Life of the Renowned Storyteller, by the English novelist Margaret Forster, and also the publication of a sequel to Rebecca, which is entitled Mrs. de Winter and was written by another English novelist of some skill and reputation, Susan Hill. Hill took on the task—a questionable one, this literary banditry—with the approval of the du Maurier family, and completed it in a mere three months. Her book, the fruit of a seven-figure publishing deal, comes hard on the heels of the sequel to Gone with the Wind, entitled Scarlett—a novel of spectacular ineptitude, which sold on both sides of the Atlantic very nicely indeed.

It might have been hoped that together the Forster biography and the Hill sequel could provoke a reëxamination of Rebecca, by far du Maurier's best book, and a reappraisal of du Maurier as a writer. More particularly, now that feminist criticism has done much to unlock texts similar to Rebecca, it might have been hoped that these books would free du Maurier from her classification as a “romantic novelist,” a tag that is appropriate to some of her work but by no means all of it, and is singularly inapt for Rebecca, a subtle, complex, and prescient novel, which employs the techniques of romantic fiction to produce a damning and subversive attack on the very notion of romance. Perhaps it was too much to ask. Forster's discursive but tart and schoolmarmish biography grazes the rich grass of the du Maurier meadow but fails to chew, let alone digest, the cud. It pays great attention to the lesbian episodes in du Maurier's life, but insufficient attention—one and a half paragraphs of analysis in the case of Rebecca—to the rather more important question of her work. Susan Hill, struggling with the legacy of a novel expertly shaped, and structured in such a way as to defy continuation, has produced a vapid, incoherent ghost of a book, stained by infirmity of purpose on every page. All the passion, anger, and ambivalence that make Rebecca so interesting have leached out. Hill, like Forster, appears to approach du Maurier, and Rebecca, through a haze of preconceptions. Perhaps that is not surprising: the critical miasma surrounding du Maurier and her novels descended at Rebecca's publication, and has rarely lifted since.

Rebecca is the story of two women, a man, and a house. Of the four, as Hitchcock once observed, the house, Manderley, is the dominant presence. Although it is never precisely located, its setting, so minutely detailed in the novel, is clearly that of Menabilly, an empty, half-ruined house in the woods above the sea in Cornwall. Du Maurier discovered it as a young woman, and she eventually lived there for over twenty years; the house lit her imagination and obsessed her for much of her life. Du Maurier's own term for Menabilly was the House of Secrets, and when she placed it at the heart of Rebecca (five years before she lived there) she created an elliptical, shifting, and deeply secretive book. The plot hinges upon secrets; the novel's milieu is that of an era and a social class that, in the name of good manners, rarely permitted the truth to be expressed; and suppression and a fearful secretiveness are its narrator's most marked characteristics.

By the time du Maurier wrote Rebecca, she had mastered the tone and the techniques of popular fiction. Her novel came well disguised as best-seller material, an intriguing story of love and murder—a “page-turner,” in modern parlance. But examine the subtext of Rebecca and you discover a perturbing, darker construct, part Grimm's fairy tale, part Freudian family romance. At the time of publication, these aspects of Rebecca went unnoticed. Whether praising or deriding the novel, many reviewers—almost all of them male—adopted a patronizing tone. To the harsher critics, Rebecca was, as the Times of London put it, a “novelette”; to the more indulgent, it was romance “in the grand tradition” or “a grand piece of story-telling.” Many American reviewers, irritated by the echoes of Jane Eyre, used Charlotte Brontë's superior gifts as a stick with which to beat du Maurier over the head. To pigeonhole du Maurier as the female author of an undemanding tale aimed primarily at an undiscerning female readership was convenient and lazy; relegating her to the waste bin of women's fiction (a category one notch higher than “servant-girl fiction”) saved critics the bother of actually having to think. If du Maurier was surprised that the critics failed to notice the grim (or Grimm) aspects of Rebecca, she remained quiet about it. She was already becoming inured to this type of response to her work. Two of her four previous novels fell within the category of historical romance, and had been promoted as such. Her first book, The Loving Spirit, was launched in the United States with a puff from Rebecca West, who remarked, with double fatuity, that it was “a whopper of a romantic novel in the vein of Emily Brontë.” Despite the fact that du Maurier's second and third novels defied any such classification, as did her short stories and some of her post-Rebecca novels, the tag “romantic novelist” stuck and has never been dislodged.

Thus was du Maurier categorized and “named” as a writer. The question of how we name and identify—and the ironies and inexactitudes inherent in that process—is central to Rebecca. Both female characters—one dead, one alive—derive their surname, as they do their status, from their husband. The first wife, Rebecca, is vivid and vengeful and, though dead, indestructible: her name lives on in the book's title. The second wife, the drab, shadowy creature who narrates the story, remains nameless. We learn that she has a “lovely and unusual” name, and that it was bestowed upon her by her father, the only other identity she has was also bestowed by a man—she is a wife, she is Mrs. de Winter.

That a narrator perceived as a heroine should be nameless was a source of continuing fascination to du Maurier's readers. It also fascinated other writers—Agatha Christie corresponded with du Maurier on the subject—and throughout her life du Maurier was plagued with fan letters seeking an explanation. Her stock reply was that she found the device technically interesting. The question is not a trivial one, for it takes us straight to the core of Rebecca—and that may well be the reason du Maurier, a secretive woman and a secretive artist, avoided answering it.

The unnamed narrator of Rebecca begins her story with a dream, with a first sentence that has become famous: “Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again.” Almost all of the brief first chapter is devoted to the details of her dream: her progress up the long, winding drive, by moonlight, to Manderley itself. The imagery, of entwined trees and encroaching undergrowth that have “mated,” is sexual; the style is scented and overwritten, that of a schoolgirl trying to speak poetically and struggling to impress. Moving forward with a sense of both anticipation and revulsion, the dream narrator first sees Manderley as intact; then, coming closer, she realizes that she is looking at a ruin, the shell of a house. With this realization, the dreamer wakes. She confirms that the dream was accurate, for Manderley no longer exists.

She can now begin to tell her story, but she begins at the end, with herself and her husband, Maximilian de Winter, living in exile in Europe for reasons as yet unclear. Their activities, as they move from hotel to hotel, sound like those of two elderly expats. They follow the cricket scores, take afternoon tea; the wife selects dull newspaper articles to read aloud to her husband, since—again for reasons unexplained—both find dullness soothing and safe. The narrator describes a routine of stifling monotony, but does so in terms that are relentlessly optimistic and trite. It comes as a considerable shock to the reader to discover, as the story loops back to the narrator's first meeting with de Winter, that she is young. The lapse of time between this present and the past events she will describe is unspecified, but it is clearly only a few years, and this makes de Winter a man of about fifty and his childless, friendless narrator-wife around twenty-five. Their life in Europe is never mentioned again, and it is easy to forget, as the drama unfolds, that the aftermath for them is exile, ennui, and putting a brave face on a living death.

The plot of the rest of Rebecca will be familiar to many readers: the narrator, working as a paid companion in Monte Carlo, meets Maxim de Winter, the owner of the legendary Manderley and a widower twice her age. She marries him, goes with him to Manderley, and there becomes progressively obsessed with Rebecca, his first wife. Patching together a portrait of Rebecca in her mind, she creates a chimera, an icon of femininity: a woman who was the perfect hostess, perfect sexual partner, perfect chatelaine, and perfect wife. This image she later perceives as false, and, in discovering the truth about Rebecca's life, she also discovers the truth about her death. Rebecca did not drown in a yachting accident in the bay below, as everyone believes; she was killed by de Winter, who from the beginning of his first marriage loathed his wife.

The narrator, once enlightened, accepts without question de Winter's version of her predecessor as a promiscuous woman who was pregnant with another man's child when he killed her, and who taunted him that she would pass off this child as his. De Winter's confession is accompanied by a declaration of love—the first he has made to the narrator despite their months of marriage. Overwhelmed by this, the narrator gives her husband immediate support. The rest of the novel, which is brilliantly plotted, concerns de Winter's efforts with his loyal wife's assistance, to suppress the truth of the murder and thus escape the hangman. This he does, but not without cost. Returning to Manderley from London, with information that gives Rebecca a motive for suicide and therefore saves him, both partners are uneasy De Winter senses impending disaster, in the back of the car, his wife is asleep-dreaming that she and Rebecca have become one, and that their hair—long and black, as Rebecca's was—is providing de Winter with a halter, or noose.

Mrs. de Winter dreams vividly twice in the novel, once at the beginning and once at the end; each time, the dream conveys a truth to her that her conscious mind cannot and will not accept. She prefers the sketchy and cliché-ridden visions she summons up when she daydreams—and she daydreams incessantly. The vision she has just had, of herself and Rebecca united, of first and second wives merged into one dangerous female avatar, she instantly pushes aside. Her husband halts the car on a crest above their home; the night sky beyond is lit with a red glow. (The color red is associated with Rebecca throughout the novel.) His wife assumes that it is the dawn, but de Winter understands at once that Manderley is burning.

This destruction of de Winter's ancestral home was prefigured in the dream with which the novel opened, and the literal agent of the destruction is far less important than its poetic agent, which is Rebecca. Like some avenging angel, Rebecca has marshalled the elements: she has risen from the sea to wreak revenge by fire—thus echoing, and not for the first time in the book, her literary ancestress the first Mrs. Rochester.

In this way, and very abruptly, the novel ends; it has come full circle. It is melodramatic in places, of course (even Jane Eyre cannot escape that criticism), but it is remarkable, given the plot, how consistently du Maurier is able to skirt melodrama. What interested her as a novelist can be summarized by the distinction Charlotte Brontë drew between writing that was “real” and writing that was “true.” There is realism in Rebecca; the mores and speech patterns of the class and the era du Maurier is describing, for instance are sharply observed. The elements that give Rebecca its force, however, owe nothing to realism; its power lies in its imagery its symmetry, its poetry—and that poetry is intensely female. The plot of Rebecca may be as unlikely as the plot of a fairy tale, but that does not alter the novel's mythic resonance and psychological truth.

One way of reading Rebecca is as a love story, in which the good woman triumphs over the bad by winning a man's love: this version, which confirms cherished conventions rather than challenges them, is the one that the nameless narrator would like us to accept, and it is a reading that undoubtedly helped make Rebecca a best-seller. Another approach is to see the novel's imaginative links not just with earlier work by female authors (Jane Eyre being, indeed, the most obvious antecedent) but also with later work, and in particular with Sylvia Plath's late poems. Rebecca is narrated by a woman masochistic and desperate to be loved—a woman seeking an authoritarian father surrogate, or, as Plath expressed it, a “man in black with a Meinkampf look.” Her search involves both effacement and abnegation, as it does for any woman who “adores a Fascist.” She duly finds such a man in de Winter, whose last name indicates sterility, coldness, an unfruitful season, and whose Christian name—Maxim, as she always abbreviates it—is a synonym for a rule of conduct and is also the name of a weapon (a machine gun).

This woman, not surprisingly, views Rebecca as a rival; what she cannot perceive is that Rebecca is also her twin, and ultimately her alter ego. The two wives have actually suffered similar fates. Both were taken as brides to Manderley—a male preserve, as the first syllable of its name (like Menabilly's) suggests. Both were marginalized within the confines of the house—Rebecca in the west wing, with its view of her symbol, the sea, and the second wife in the east wing, overlooking a rose garden, that symbol of husbandry. The difference between them is in their reactions: the second wife submits, allowing her identity to be dictated by her husband, and by the class, attitudes, and value systems he embraces; the first wife has rebelled. Rebecca has dared to be an unchaste wife, to break the “rules of conduct” that Maxim lives by; her ultimate transgression is to threaten the system of primogeniture. That sin, undermining the entire patriarchal edifice that is Manderley, cannot be forgiven, and Rebecca dies for it.

The response of the narrator to Rebecca's rebellion is deeply ambivalent, and it is this ambivalence which fuels the novel. Her apparent reaction is that of a conventional woman of her time: abhorrence. Yet there are indications throughout the text that the second Mrs. de Winter would like to emulate Rebecca, even to be her. Although Rebecca is never seen, is dead, and has in theory been forever silenced, Mrs. de Winter's obsession with her insures that Rebecca will triumph over anonymity and effacement: even a bullet through the heart and burial at sea cannot quench her vampiric power. Again, one is reminded of Plath's embodiment of amoral, anarchic female force—“I rise with my red hair / And I eat men like air.” Within the convention of a story, Rebecca's pallid successor is able to do what she dare not risk in everyday life: celebrate her predecessor.

The final twist of Rebecca is a covert one. De Winter kills not one wife but two. He kills the first with a gun; he kills the second by a slower, more insidious method. 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 exilé glimpsed at the beginning, she becomes again what she was when she met him—a paid companion to a tyrant. For humoring his whims and obeying his dictates, her recompense this time is love, not money, and the cost is her identity. This is the final irony of the novel, and the last of its many reversals. A story that attempts to bury Rebecca, the “unwomanly” woman, in fact resurrects her, while the voice that narrates this story is that of a ghost, a true dead woman.

The themes of Rebecca—identity, doubling, the very different but intimately linked meanings of love and murder—recur again and again in du Maurier's work. That the circumstances of her own life were the source of many of those themes is unquestionable. Margaret Forster, in her biography, attempts to disentangle some of the possible influences: du Maurier's relationship with her father, who wished she had been a boy; the remoteness of her mother; the difficulties she encountered, as an unconventional and independent woman, in her marriage to a conventional and punctilious husband. Forster charts, in a dogged way, du Maurier's need to write and her simultaneous fear that to do so was somehow “unfeminine.” She lights upon the image of the “boy-in-the-box”—which du Maurier used, often confusingly, to refer both to the force that made her write and to the impulses that attracted her to women—but never examines the phrase, or its implications, very closely. That du Maurier saw creativity as masculine, and her own creativity as therefore aberrant (she described herself as a “half-breed”), explains much of the ambivalence in her texts and much of the anguish in her life. Forster does not delve very deeply into this material, and passes quickly over the work itself in favor of domestic trivia. Du Maurier's marriage is left so nearly unexplored that her husband remains faceless; little attempt is made to convey or understand Cornwall and what it signified for her; and, as for Menabilly, the house central to her identity, it is dealt with peremptorily, in a tone of puritanical disapproval. Menabilly is damp, cold, over-large; it requires servants, and is unsuitable for small children. … This nannyish tone becomes wearing indeed. At any minute, one feels, Forster will recommend a hot bath and an early night to get all this foolishness out of du Maurier's system.

Du Maurier's life was, in many respects, as filled with paradoxes as her novels. As Forster recounts, she came from a family of artists: her mother was an actress, and her grandfather was the illustrator and writer George du Maurier, the author of Trilby. She and her sisters grew up surrounded by writers and actors, who were their parents' close friends. Yet du Maurier married a career soldier in one of Britain's most élite regiments, a man who seems to have been a traditionalist to his fingertips. They met in highly charged circumstances when du Maurier was twenty-four and living in a house overlooking the Fowey River. Browning sailed his boat to Fowey in the hope of meeting her—he had read and admired her first novel. Du Maurier, already sexually experienced, was attracted to him immediately and was fully prepared to begin an affair; Browning found this proposal unthinkable and “sleazy.” But their courtship was speedy: they met in April, 1932, and married that July. They shared a love of the sea and of boats; by the time they met, du Maurier was an accomplished sailor (as, it should be noted, is Rebecca). But as their long marriage wore on, their differences became more significant than their similarities. Browning—handsome, well groomed, apparently the perfect soldier—had been traumatized by his experiences in France in the First World War; he was plagued by minor physical ailments and by nightmares. He rapidly became dependent on du Maurier for comfort and reassurance, while remaining a domestic martinet. Forster documents Browning's impatience when his wife could not hire a reliable cook or properly instruct housemaids, and notes that this intimidated du Maurier, but she fails to adequately analyze the underlying resentment—a resentment that du Maurier seems to have mostly concealed in her day-to-day life, but that clearly surfaces in her novels.

For most of her marriage to Browning, du Maurier provided the major source of income, financing their homes and the upbringing of their three children. Yet she was afflicted with guilt at her achievements, believing that women had to choose whether to “create after one's fashion, or be a woman and breed.” She maintained that the “two don't go together and never will. Maybe there should be a rule against women who work marrying.”

After the war, du Maurier's marriage became strained; there were infidelities on both sides. Browning began drinking heavily, and his moodiness increased, earning him the family nickname of Moper. For many years, he and du Maurier lived virtually separate lives, she at Menabilly and he in London. The resulting loneliness perhaps helped to propel du Maurier into a platonic affair with Ellen Doubleday (the wife of her American publisher) and then into a brief, less platonic affair with Gertrude Lawrence. Even so, throughout this postwar period, du Maurier remained essentially loyal to her husband, indulgent of his foibles, and protective of him and his reputation. In the meantime, du Maurier was becoming an immensely successful professional woman, the author of a sequence of best-sellers (of which, post-Rebecca, My Cousin Rachel, of 1951, is perhaps the most interesting). Du Maurier's books were known worldwide, yet she continued to eschew celebrity, usually refusing to make public appearances.

Browning died in 1965. Du Maurier spent the remaining twenty-four years of her life living alone in Cornwall—first at Menabilly and then at Kilmarth, its dower house. Du Maurier adapted well to widowhood at first, finding consolation in her children and later in her grandchildren. Then, in the mid-seventies, she suffered another kind of death: her ability to write began to fail her. Forster's account of these painful years, during which du Maurier closed in upon herself and in the end virtually willed her own death, makes up the strongest section of the biography. Forster writes with sympathy and understanding of that lonely decline, but the section is too brief and too long delayed to compensate for the tone that dominates earlier chapters.

Too often, one can sense a simmering class resentment in Forster's writing, it is as if she cannot bring herself to forgive du Maurier's bohemian but affluent up-bringing. Adopting a curiously dated and masculine set of values, she upbraids du Maurier for a host of tiny sins, for being unable to cook or sew, for employing nursemaids—all this unremarkable in a woman of that background and period. The portrait of du Maurier that ultimately emerges is of a self-centered, spoiled, and wayward woman. Du Maurier's lifelong generosity gets occasional grudging mention, but her freedom of spirit, her marked (and, for her era, extraordinary) independence, and the nature of her struggle as a writer are pushed to the margins.

This distortion is compounded by Forster's quasi-scholarly methodology. She was given every assistance by the du Maurier family and had extensive access to du Maurier's letters. These are duly quoted, but often with insufficient indication in the notes as to whether the quoted comments are contemporaneous with the period being discussed. Worse, du Maurier's own words are rarely quoted at any length; instead, they are chopped up, with interpolations from Forster, into the biographer's equivalent of sound bites. The effect is to silence du Maurier—and, on occasion, to turn her into a ventriloquist's dummy.

Ventriloquism, of course, was the task facing Susan Hill when she agreed to write her sequel to Rebecca. Hill is a sensitive and interesting novelist with her own voice, so it is perhaps not unkind to say that in Mrs. de Winter she has failed. By opting for the obvious choice—continuing the story where du Maurier left off—Hill has overlooked a more challenging and potentially fruitful option: to provide, through a kind of prequel, that aspect of the story which du Maurier denied us, Rebecca's version of events. This approach—used with such great effect by Jean Rhys in Wide Sargasso Sea, her account of Rochester's first marriage—has the great advantage of leaving the second author indebted to but free of the first. In the context of Rebecca, the idea is not new; Antonia Fraser, to du Maurier's amusement, published “Rebecca's Story” in brief magazine form in 1976. In rejecting that option, Hill was forced to adopt a form of ghostwriting.

Facing this basic technical problem, Hill comes unstuck. Within a very few pages, it is apparent that her pastiche is superficial. She can convey some of the narrator's traits and tics—Mrs. de Winter's propensity for fantasizing, and the refuge she finds in truisms and banalities. What Hill cannot convey is this woman's deeply suppressed inner voice. There is no counterpoint here; as there is throughout Rebecca—no irony and little contradiction, no suggestion that what we are being given is the narrator's, but not the author's, version of events.

Hill has no Manderley to anchor her text, of course, and this loss of an imaginative domain is the second factor to undermine her. For much of her sequel, the de Winters continue their European odyssey. Pursued in theory by the furies of guilt and retribution, they take off for Scotland, Italy, the Rhine, even Turkey at one point, but the furies appear to lose interest in them, as does the reader, almost at once. For an unconscionable period, virtually nothing happens, and then Hill, with an air of desperation, abandons the guide-book prose and drags the de Winters back to England. She settles them in an unconvincing spot in the Cotswolds, reunites them with some secondary characters from Rebecca, and from there squeaks through to her dénouement. The freneticism with which she changes location cannot disguise the fact that from beginning to end we are in a place far from the arena of Rebecca but only too identifiable—in stock theatre, where third-rate actors play weekly rep.

Readers interested in du Maurier would do well to ignore this travesty, and return to Rebecca and to du Maurier's other books. For those in search of a biography, Forster's account is readable enough, and until a more searching account is written this must serve as a stopgap. It is sad, and surprising, that two women, both novelists, should tangle with Rebecca yet continue to misconstrue it. Why has a reëxamination of Rebecca been delayed so long? It cannot be purely a matter of literary snobbery, for neither Forster nor Hill is a snob of that sort. Perhaps, as du Maurier herself sensed, the answer is that Rebecca is indeed a “grim” novel, raising issues about the weaknesses of their sex which women might well prefer to pass over. Feminism may have distanced modern readers from the attitudes of du Maurier's narrator and helped women to dissociate love from acquiescence, but their enfranchisement is hardly complete. The latest best-seller lists only confirm that the sly suggestion underlying Rebecca remains valid after fifty-five years: both in life and in bookstores, women continue to buy romance.