Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

BBC’s Big Read #14

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“I wondered how many people there were in the world who suffered, and continued to suffer, because they could not break out from their own web of shyness and reserve, and in their blindness and folly built up a great distorted wall in front of them that hid the truth.”

For some reason, Rebecca was an absolute slog for me to get through. Now that I have finished reading it after almost four months, I am still not sure what made it such a struggle because I liked the book. Objectively, I think it is brilliant. Subjectively, I suppose it must not be my thing, or I would not have taken so long to finish.

I will say that I have never related so much to a narrator with whom I am ashamed to feel such a kinship. The new Mrs. de Winter’s shyness, awkwardness, and feelings of hopeless inferiority kept making me cringe with undesired relatability. At least I have never fallen in love with a complete jerk who is way too old for me. Seriously, Maxim is the worst! Maybe I do not think the narrator deserves to suffer from her shortcomings only because I can empathize with so many of them, but I am glad Max suffers from his shortcomings!

I enjoyed the essay “The House of Secrets” at the back of my edition more than the actual book. In it, du Maurier wrote about Menabilly—the real house that the fictional Manderley was based upon—and I found her descriptions of the irrational love one can hold for a building to be extremely relatable:

“As I sat on the edge of the lawn and stared at her I felt as many romantic, foolish people have felt about the Sphinx. Here was a block of stone, even as the desert Sphinx, made by man for his own purpose—yet she had a personality that was hers alone, without the touch of human hand. One family only had lived within her walls. One family who had given her life. They had been born there, they had loved, they had quarrelled, they had suffered, they had died. And out of these emotions she had woven a personality for herself, she had become what their thoughts and their desires had made her.”

Next time I read Rebecca, I will try an audio version instead of the physical edition. I think that will make it much easier to digest all the wonderful, albeit long-winded, descriptions of Manderley and the nature surrounding it.

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𝓟.𝓢. This review was crossposted from Goodreads because it contains actual thoughts rather than a typically facetious single-sentence remark. View all my book ratings and pointless takes on Goodreads or The StoryGraph.