Mrs. de Winter
[In the excerpt below, Rubin finds that Hill's sequel is "a little duller and more predictable" than Daphne du Maurier's novel.]
For much of her professional life, British writer Daphne du Maurier was dogged by feelings of disappointment at not being considered a serious artist.
Rebecca, du Maurier's most celebrated novel, published in 1938 and shortly thereafter made into a classic Hitchcock film, is still widely read today. But its fame overshadowed her subsequent work, including such novels as My Cousin Rachel (1951), The Scapegoat (1957), and The House on the Strand (1969), and her short stories, the best-known of which furnished further material for Hitchcock: "The Birds."
Ironically, some of the very qualities that once relegated du Maurier to second-class literary citizenship now excite the interest of feminist scholars engaged in reexamining women's lives and writings. Romantic myths of brooding, strong-willed aristocratic men, lovelorn Cinderellas, mysterious mansions, and cruel, beauteous rivals reveal something about the ways in which women have seen themselves….
Du Maurier was constantly bombarded by requests from people wanting to write sequels to Rebecca. One wonders if she might have looked more favorably on such an attempt if it were by a novelist already established in her own right, like Susan Hill. In her novel Mrs. de Winter, Hill deftly captures the keynotes of du Maurier's style and the intense self-conscious, impressionable sensibility of the original narrator-heroine, wisely following du Maurier's lead in never mentioning this self-effacing lady's first name.
Ten years into the future, Hill's Mrs. de Winter is convincingly the same person, but a little older and wiser. "I had gone from being a gauche, badly dressed girl to being an uninterestingly, dully dressed married woman …," she wryly remarks. She is still vulnerable to her own active imagination. This time, however, it is guilt rather than jealousy that threatens the de Winters' marital happiness.
Hill reintroduces characters, themes, and situations from du Maurier's original novel rather as a composer might rework motifs from a symphony's earlier movements in its final one. But in another way, she undercuts the thrust of du Maurier's original work by changing from a story about jealousy to a story about guilt. Hill's most original contribution, thus, is also the most contrary to the spirit of du Maurier's book, where it is made abundantly clear that the evil Rebecca not only deserved to die, but connived at her own shooting because she knew she had a fatal disease. Hill has replaced du Maurier's fierce, slightly over-the-top romanticism with a severe, if rather heavy-handed, moralism, which ultimately makes this accomplished and skillfully written sequel a little duller and more predictable than the remarkable novel that inspired it.
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