29. Rebecca: Daphne du Maurier’s Gothic Epic

How did Daphne du Maurier use her own experience to write the chilling events of Rebecca? Who is the sinister Mrs Danvers? And, what really happened to Rebecca? Join Dominic Sandbrook and Tabitha Syrett as they delve into the fascinating story behind the writing of Rebecca, the world it was born of, and the novel itself. Download the Klarna app to stay on top of your money, so you can think about, well, anything else. Klarna balance account required to receive cashback points. Limitations, terms, and conditions apply. Exclusions apply. Learn more at https://www.klarna.com/uk/buyer-protection-description/. You can order Rebecca and explore our favourite Folio books at http://foliosociety.com/thebookclub Email us: ⁠⁠[email protected]⁠⁠ For analysis, book recommendations and more, sign up to our newsletter, Book Club Notes, introduced weekly by Tabby or Dominic. Sign up at: https://www.thebookclubhq.com/ Instagram: ⁠⁠@bookclubpodhq⁠⁠ TikTok: ⁠⁠@thebookclubpodhq⁠⁠ X: ⁠⁠@bookclubpodhq⁠⁠ YouTube: ⁠⁠@TheBookClubPodHQ⁠⁠ Senior Producer: Nicole Maslen Assistant Producer: Alfie Norris Social Producer: Harry Balden Video Editor: Joe Pettit Executive Producer: Dom Johnson Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 1:10Speaker 02

  I heard a step behind me and turning around, I saw Mrs Danvers. I shall never forget the expression on her face. Triumphant, gloating, excited in a strange, unhealthy way. I felt very frightened.

• 1:25Speaker 03

  Is anything the matter, madam?

• 1:26Speaker 02

  I'm all right, Mrs Danvers. I did not expect to see you.

• 1:30Speaker 03

  You wanted to see the room. Why have you never asked me to show it to you before? I was ready to show it to you every day. You had only to ask me.

• 1:39Speaker 02

  I wanted to run away, but I could not move. I went on watching her eyes.

• 1:43Speaker 03

  Now you're here, let me show you everything.

• 1:46Speaker 02

  She said, her voice ingratiating and sweet as honey. Horrible, false.

• 1:52Speaker 03

  I know you want to see it all. You've wanted to for a long time and you were too shy to ask. It's a lovely room, isn't it? The loveliest room you've ever seen. That was her bed. It's a beautiful bed, isn't it? Here is her nightdress inside the case. You've been touching it, haven't you? This was the nightdress she was wearing for the last time before she died. Would you like to touch it again?

• 2:19Speaker 02

  She took the nightdress from the case and held it before me.

• 2:23Speaker 03

  Feel it, hold it.

• 2:25Speaker 02

  She said.

• 2:26Speaker 03

  How soft and light it is, isn't it? I haven't washed it since she wore it for the last time. I put it out like this at the dressing gown and slippers, just as I put them out for her. The night she never came back. She was wearing slacks, of course, and a shirt when she died. They were torn from her body in the water, though. There was nothing on the body when it was found all those weeks afterwards.

• 2:51Speaker 02

  Hello, everybody. That terrifying reading was from Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier, published in 1938 to widespread popularity. It is a Gothic novel that tells the story of a young girl who falls in love with a much older, very wealthy widower. She discovers that he and his magnificent, eerie house, Mandaly, are haunted, not literally, but haunted by the ghost of his deceased wife, Rebecca, the titular Rebecca. And this impression of mystery and haunting and secrets is heightened by the vampiric housekeeper, Mrs Danvers, played there exceptionally, I think, by Dame Sandbrook Danvers herself.

• 3:37Speaker 02

  And this sends the new wife, the character played by me, into a psychological spiral that sends her to the brink of despair and actually close to suicide.

• 3:46Speaker 03

  This episode is brought to you by Klarna.

• 3:49Speaker 02

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• 3:59Speaker 03

  Yes, I want to use my brain power to focus on the really big questions. Was Heathcliff born evil? Was it the Moors who made him that way? And crucially, who is going to be the next fairy love interest in the Court of Thorns and Roses?

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• 4:38Speaker 02

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• 4:55Speaker 02

  And the book is thrilling. It's tense. It is eerie. So you can easily see why this was one of the books that Alfred Hitchcock chose to adapt for the big screen in his famous movie, which won the Oscar in 1940.

• 5:10Speaker 03

  It's a wonderful book, actually. I hadn't read it before doing this show. You and Nicole, our producer, were very keen to do it. And I loved it. I'm going to come straight out and spoil, you know, if people are waiting with bated breath and I've heard it, I'll give it right away. I really enjoyed this. I read it in-

• 5:26Speaker 02

  Sandbrook speaks.

• 5:27Speaker 03

  Sandbrook speaks.

• 5:28Speaker 02

  Book good.

• 5:30Speaker 03

  In two days, absolutely riveted. It's one of the great kind of Gothic 20th century novels. It's a wonderful mystery story. It's quite surprising, I think. So if you think it's all a ghost story, you will be mistaken because it turns into something I think much darker and more intriguing. And the tricks that Daphne du Maurier plays with her narrator, with her characterization, with her control of information, how much we know and how much we don't. They are worthy of a great master. So for example, we did Casio Ishiguro very early on in this series.

• 6:07Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 6:08Speaker 03

  Never Let Me Go. And I think there are definitely some similarities there. But Tabby, you have always been a fan of this book, haven't you?

• 6:15Speaker 02

  I have, but I kept thinking when I was reading it this time, I wish, I wish I could read it all over again, as though I'd never read it.

• 6:22Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 6:23Speaker 02

  For the suspense, because the big twist at the end, which we'll be coming to after the break, you just don't see it coming. Nevertheless, even though I knew what happened, I still felt the thrill of it, this kind of tug that pulls you page to page. And I loved the pacing. It starts quite slowly. You could almost be lured into thinking that you're reading a romance at one point. But actually, you know, it gets darker and darker, more and more keeps happening. And you just want these questions answered. You want to know, who was Rebecca? What was she like? What happened at Mandaly? I just think Daphne du Maurier, she is the mistress of suspense. I love her other book, Jamaica Inn.

• 7:02Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah.

• 7:03Speaker 02

  And she has the same kind of haunting atmosphere there and the same questions that you don't really get answered until the last third of the book. But the interesting thing is that this time rereading it, I had a far more critical view of our narrator, who we'll be meeting, and also Maxim, the man that I mentioned, the older widower who she marries. But on that note, should we get into the plot and just explain who all these characters are? Because essentially, it is a book of three parts. So in the first part, our childish, awkward narrator is in France, Cocteau. She is a companion for a wealthy, dreadful American woman who's fascinated by the English aristocracy and who's who. There she meets and falls in love with Maxim de Winter.

• 7:47Speaker 02

  He's distinguished, he's well known, and he's famous for this house that he has in Cornwall, this estate, Mandaly. But the other thing that we know about him, that the awful American tells us, is that his wife, Rebecca, died a year earlier and he's just torn apart by grief. And then the young narrator gets to know him. He seems fond of her, but we're never entirely sure. And unexpectedly, he asks her to marry him and she agrees.

• 8:15Speaker 03

  Yeah, so she's, as you say, she's very awkward and she's young and she's, she appears to be innocent and naive. She has become completely infatuated with him, hasn't she? Obsessed with him. She's stunned.

• 8:26Speaker 02

  Shamelessly so.

• 8:28Speaker 03

  She's stunned when he asks her to marry him. Back they go to Mandaly, this house that she's heard so much about, that clearly is the sort of talk of Europe. And far from being sort of intoxicated with excitement at her newlywed status and her status as the mistress of this house, she is overwhelmed by it. Everything seems imbued with the presence of her predecessor, this woman Rebecca.

• 8:52Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 8:53Speaker 03

  The servants are still enthralled to Rebecca. The housekeeper, Mrs Danvers, who basically rules the roost at Mandaly. She seems to have taken a violent dislike to our narrator from the very beginning.

• 9:08Speaker 02

  It's brilliantly done because if you imagine Jeeves or something like that, or a butler, your classic housekeeper, it's incredibly restrained, which means it's very chilly and somehow that is far more daunting.

• 9:21Speaker 03

  Exactly. This sort of passive aggressive politeness of Mrs Danvers is what intimidates our narrator. She discovers, as we found in that, in that reading, that there's a whole wing of the house that has basically been shut up. That was Rebecca and Maxim's old, it was where they lived, basically. Her bedroom or her old stuff. We had the reference there to her- Her night dress, her slippers, her dressing gown.

• 9:44Speaker 02

  Unwashed, which strikes me as sinister in the extreme.

• 9:49Speaker 03

  It is very sinister. Maxim has become, her husband, her new husband, has become very distant and clipped and aloof. There is a sort of great set piece, which is they are persuaded to throw a costume ball, basically a fancy dress party. And the narrator, spoiler alert for those of you who haven't read the book, so just be careful. We are going to have to spoil it, obviously, in different ways.

• 10:14Speaker 02

  Yeah, the twist is central, really, to this book.

• 10:17Speaker 03

  Yeah, but we'll leave that till after the break, I think. But anyway, she is persuaded to wear a costume that turns out to be the same costume that Rebecca wore, you know, a year or a couple of years earlier. And she's persuaded to do this by Mrs. Danvers as a horrible trick, as a way to humiliate her. And the narrator sinks into this, I mean, she has this absolute crisis moment. It feels like, you know, her husband has turned against her, all the servants are against her, she doesn't fit, she is riddled with guilt, with disappointment, with inadequacy in all of this. And then there is a third act. And the third act starts with the discovery, which completely turns on its head, everything that we believe about the relationship between

• 11:00Speaker 03

  the three main characters, Maxim, the narrator, and Rebecca, the dead Rebecca. And the Gothic book then starts to turn to something a little bit more like, I think, in 1930's whodunit, don't you?

• 11:13Speaker 02

  Yeah, I agree, I agree. So Daphne du Maurier said of this point in the novel, kind of this turning point, she said, crash, bang, then something happens. And she's not wrong.

• 11:24Speaker 03

  All through the book. I mean, one of the things I think people love about it, I mean, I have lots of friends who love Rebecca, especially female friends. And they like the house, the love triangle, the, above all, I think, the atmosphere.

• 11:37Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's, that's what does it for me.

• 11:39Speaker 03

  The sense of foreboding, the sea crashing at the cliffs, the Cornish cliffs just below the house, the sense that great elemental forces are gathering that are going to sweep you away.

• 11:49Speaker 02

  But the sea in so many of Daphne du Maurier's books, because she loved Cornwall so much, it's kind of, it's the uncanny soundtrack to the setting. And it comes to haunt you, as it does the characters.

• 12:03Speaker 03

  So Daphne du Maurier, let's talk about Daphne du Maurier, because Rebecca is born out of her own remarkable kind of psychology. And the sort of the, the observation of the relationships between men and women, and the jealousies and insecurity, they reflect her own background and her own life to some extent, don't they, Tabby?

• 12:21Speaker 02

  Lots has been written about the extent to which Rebecca is a product of her own life, her own relationships, her own family, et cetera. So let's dig into that.

• 12:30Speaker 03

  So she's born in May 1907. She's from a very celebrated theatrical family. So her grandfather basically inadvertently invented the Trilby hat.

• 12:38Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 12:39Speaker 03

  I was telling you about this great fact, this great fact the other day, and I see how thrilled you were by it.

• 12:44Speaker 02

  I actually, so thrilled was I by it, that I actually omitted it from my notes.

• 12:48Speaker 03

  It's the single most important thing anyone needs to know about Rebecca.

• 12:50Speaker 02

  I don't approve of Trilby hats, so.

• 12:52Speaker 03

  No, I don't. I think they're performative, aren't they? They insist by themselves. Yeah, completely. Anyway, her grandfather wrote a play called Trilby, in which Svengali, the character of Svengali, was born.

• 13:02Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 13:03Speaker 03

  Anyway, people wore these hats in the play, hence they were called Trilby hats, because the play was called Trilby. And, you know, a legend was born. Anyway, let's put that, let's put that on one side.

• 13:14Speaker 02

  In fact, never mind Rebecca, let's just talk more about Trilby hats, I think. That's what you're really, that's your real passion.

• 13:21Speaker 03

  Well, it's a play. We could, we'd do a whole episode about the play Trilby.

• 13:24Speaker 02

  Please spare me.

• 13:24Speaker 03

  So her father Gerald, Daphne's father Gerald, was this distinguished actor manager. They were extremely close. And some of her biographers suggest that the unusual closeness of the father-daughter relationship finds its way into her books. And actually, the relationship between Maxim and the narrator

• 13:42Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 13:43Speaker 03

  has a very father-daughter side to it.

• 13:46Speaker 02

  A lot of people think that he was, he may have been an inspiration for Maxim.

• 13:50Speaker 03

  Yeah, I can absolutely see that. So she, she sort of wrestles with her own identity a bit, doesn't she?

• 13:56Speaker 02

  She does.

• 13:57Speaker 03

  She has a sort of alter ego for herself, who she calls the boy in the box. And she imagines herself as a boy. And she, the boy, she gives the boy a name, Eric Avon. She is taught by governesses, she goes to finishing school in Paris, she's a massive reader, she loves the Brontes, and there is tons of the Brontes, Emily and Charlotte Brontë, in this book. She loves Robert Louis Stevenson, she loves Joseph Conrad, and she loves Cornwall. And there's tons of Cornwall in this book. She goes to Cornwall, she loves the sort of isolation, she loves the fact that it's a sort of, it feels like going back in time. So for people, I know, I know we have like, American listeners and whatnot, Cornwall, it's in the southwest corner of England, it feels like a place apart, it's got kind

• 14:39Speaker 03

  of Celtic traditions, incredibly beautiful, rugged, sort of rural landscape. So she goes to Cornwall, and she finds this house called Menabilly.

• 14:48Speaker 02

  I, I think this is so romantic, and I totally get this. There's a building where I live, near where I live, and every time I walk past it, I think, oh, God, you know, I'm going to write a book about this or something one day, because it's kind of Gothic and mysterious and crumbling. So I understand why it is that this ruin, this great, beautiful ruin, covered in ivy, hidden, dilapidated, takes such a hold of her imagination.

• 15:13Speaker 03

  And she ends up leasing it, doesn't she, from the owners, who are the Rashley family? And she restores it, and she lives in it, but she can never own it, because it belongs to this other family.

• 15:24Speaker 02

  Though she loved it. She said she had kissed the stones of it. She loved it so much.

• 15:29Speaker 03

  So the funny thing is that actually, she is like Rebecca.

• 15:32Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 15:32Speaker 03

  She inhabits and defines this house that is not hers, just as Rebecca haunts Mandarly, which is the house of the De Winter family. So that's the house, and then the, her own life and the book. So 1932, she marries this guy who ends up becoming Lieutenant General Sir Frederick Browning, who she calls Tommy. And lots of people think that their troubled relationship, or their very colourful relationship, finds its way into her fiction, don't they?

• 16:01Speaker 02

  Yeah, definitely. So he had a fiance before they were married. She was supposed to be very glamorous, she had long black hair. And there, there are theories that Daphne du Maurier is, is, you know, sort of projecting her jealousy over that relationship into the relationship between the narrator and Maxim in this. But I think they were fond of each other. I mean, they remained married for the rest of his life. They had three children, but she was far from maternal. You know, she struggled with her identity as a woman throughout her life. And I think this probably applies to her maternal instincts. She wrote at one point, I'm not one of those mothers who live for having their brats with them

• 16:42Speaker 02

  all the time. She didn't like conventional domestic life. She preferred her world of solitary writing. And so with Tommy's long periods away with the army, it suited them both quite well. And they both encouraged each other to have a great deal of personal freedom. And that seems to have applied to their extramarital love lives, because they both were unfaithful. She had a well documented affair with a guy called Christopher Puxley, who was some

• 17:07Speaker 03

  Landowner, right?

• 17:08Speaker 02

  Herefordshire landowner. And then Tommy had several mistresses during the latter half of their marriage. And then in 1957, there's one particularly bad incident, because following a nervous breakdown, it came out that he'd been having two affairs concurrently, which, I mean, exhausting, surely.

• 17:25Speaker 03

  A lot of pressure on the diary.

• 17:26Speaker 02

  A lot of pressure on the diary. I think, I think it would break anyone. But this, this devastated Daphne du Maurier. So she obviously wasn't at ease with all these, you know, liberties, these, these affairs. And so, again, that surely, surely seeps into Rebecca in some way. The complexity of this marriage, the jealousy, I mean, that's pop psychology, but I don't see how it couldn't have, really.

• 17:47Speaker 03

  Of course. And there's a question about her sexuality, isn't there, that some people think she, she might actually have been gay?

• 17:53Speaker 02

  So certainly, she, she was very emotionally attached to lots of women, but I think probably also physically. So she became infatuated with this woman called Ellen Doubleday, who was the wife of her strange name, the wife of her American publisher, this was unrequited, though. But then she almost definitely had a sexual relationship with an actor called Gertrude Lawrence. Her biographer, Margaret Forster, wrote that, based on her, you know, her personal writings, her letters to very close friends, she referred to her heterosexual relationships with the codename Cairo, and then her homosexual relationships with the codename Venice.

• 18:29Speaker 03

  Wow.

• 18:30Speaker 02

  I think that's quite classy.

• 18:31Speaker 03

  So she starts writing stories, doesn't she, at the end of the 1920s? She writes a novel, which is written in Cornwall, called The Loving Spirit in 1931.

• 18:39Speaker 02

  She wrote almost all of her books in Cornwall, at, at this house, the house that inspired Mandarly.

• 18:43Speaker 03

  She writes Jamaica Inn, which is her other really, really famous book. And then she signs a deal with Victor Galant, the left wing publisher. She has a title in mind for the next book, which is Rebecca. She has the title, but she actually doesn't have the plot.

• 18:59Speaker 02

  No.

• 19:00Speaker 03

  And she's been thinking, with jealousy, kind of sexual, romantic jealousy, would be a brilliant subject for a book. It's interesting that she thinks about this at exactly this point in her life, when she marries Tommy, her husband. And you mentioned Tommy had been engaged before. He'd been engaged to this woman, Jan Ricardo, very beautiful, glamorous, long, dark hair.

• 19:22Speaker 02

  Like Rebecca.

• 19:23Speaker 03

  Like Rebecca, exactly. Anyway, signs a deal to do the book, gets an advance, struggles to write it at first. And then actually, the, the point when she sort of turns it around and really gets into it, is when she and Tommy end up going to Egypt. And she's missing Cornwall, she's missing, you know, the rain and the sea and the landscape and stuff. In Rebecca, the narrator talks at one point, she's thinking about Mandarly at the beginning. And she says she's bewildered at the glittering sun, the hard, clean sky of the Mediterranean. And then that almost gives Daphne du Maurier the spark, the idea of the contrast between somebody who has moved to the Mediterranean, and it feels so different, but is yearning and pining for Cornwall.

• 20:08Speaker 03

  And then she goes back to England, the writing really picks up. She basically takes four months to do it.

• 20:14Speaker 02

  You know, actually, apparently she said that a big part of her being able to do that so quickly over Christmas was because she sent her daughters to go and stay with someone else. And she said, without the distraction, it meant that she could really hone in on the manuscript.

• 20:26Speaker 03

  It's not the lesson of this entire podcast, going back to the very first episodes, that you can be a nice person and have a loving family and kids who adore you, or you can be a great writer.

• 20:38Speaker 02

  God, that's actually true. It does seem to be the case.

• 20:40Speaker 03

  Quite hard to do both.

• 20:41Speaker 02

  Terrifying thought.

• 20:42Speaker 03

  So anyway, she, she writes the, the book. She, she says, you know, bit by bit, it became clear in her mind, a beautiful home, a first wife, jealousy, a wreck, perhaps the sea near to the house, something terrible would have to happen. I did not know what. And she finds her way through that. She sends it to Glantz and it's a massive, massive hit when it comes out, isn't it?

• 21:05Speaker 02

  It's never been out of print. The 20,000 copies, the first print run, sold out more than twice that number. It remains her most popular novel, certainly her most famous. Interestingly though, it wasn't that well reviewed when it came out. So in the Christian Science Monitor, V S Pritchett wrote that the novel would be here today, gone tomorrow, how wrong he was.

• 21:26Speaker 03

  Wow, yeah.

• 21:26Speaker 02

  And the Times wrote that the material is of the humblest. Nothing in this is beyond the novelette. So I think people thought it was a little bit sort of thrilling, maybe bodice rippy, I don't know.

• 21:37Speaker 03

  Yeah, a bit too melodramatic.

• 21:38Speaker 02

  Not something to be taken seriously, a bit of a thrill seeker.

• 21:42Speaker 03

  If you were being harsh about this.

• 21:43Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 21:44Speaker 03

  You think about some of the other books we've talked about from this period in the show, 1984, For Whom the Bell Tolls, Mrs. Dalloway. This book is so much more melodramatic, isn't it?

• 21:54Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 21:55Speaker 03

  And yet, I think it is brilliantly written.

• 21:58Speaker 02

  I agree. The writing is luscious and sumptuous and gorgeous, but I do, I do see what you mean in that at this period of time, you're getting so many books that are wrestling with the old forms or wrestling with the new world. She doesn't really engage with form and she doesn't really engage with the outside world at all. But I think that's part of the power. You're sucked into Mandari.

• 22:18Speaker 03

  Yeah, in the same way that Wuthering Heights is, is a very claustrophobic internal book.

• 22:24Speaker 02

  Exactly, yeah.

• 22:24Speaker 03

  About the relationships between the characters. This, a Gothic book, of course, this, which is very strongly influenced by Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre, feels like that, doesn't it?

• 22:32Speaker 02

  Yeah. And she, she categorised, she called it a study in jealousy, but she's always been very, she was always very coy about having any origin in her own life. But you just mentioned Jane Eyre there.

• 22:43Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 22:44Speaker 02

  So in the mood and the plot of Rebecca and the character of the narrator herself, you can see the influence of Jane Eyre everywhere. I mean, it's a poor girl who meets a wealthy older man with dark secrets, a gloomy old house, a former wife, barely seen, flitting at the corners of the mind and imagination with dark, luscious hair. Interestingly as well, Wuthering Heights was a very big influence on the book that she wrote just before Rebecca, which is Jamaica Inn. Yeah. So again, it's this gloomy Gothic feel. And just as in Jane Eyre, you know, where Jane is our narrator, our eyes and our ears, here too, the story is guided and unfolded by the narrator, one perspective, her first person narrative. But I actually think that

• 23:26Speaker 02

  Jane Eyre is a character with much more fire and backbone than the narrator in this.

• 23:31Speaker 03

  We've talked about a few Gothic influenced books in this, in this show. And you could argue that in all the 20th century fiction, this is the supreme Gothic novel, isn't it? Because it's saturated in this very creepy sort of dark atmosphere. And the key to it really is the, well, you've got the house, which is, I mean, part of it is closed up and disused.

• 23:54Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 23:54Speaker 03

  Whenever you have that in fiction. I mean, it's in Sarah Water's novels, there are always houses with bits cordoned off or closed off.

• 24:00Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 24:00Speaker 03

  There's always something creepy about that. And then there's the character, Mrs. Danvers, who's always described as looking like a skull or a ghost, isn't she?

• 24:08Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 24:08Speaker 03

  Standing.

• 24:08Speaker 02

  She's vampiric. She's totally vampiric.

• 24:11Speaker 03

  But Mrs. Danvers, what's so interesting is she knows this and she almost connives at creating a Gothic atmosphere in order to terrify.

• 24:19Speaker 02

  Yeah, she's constantly popping out of the shadows like Count Dracula or something.

• 24:23Speaker 03

  Right.

• 24:23Speaker 02

  You hear a disembodied voice behind you, you just know that Danvers is here to freak you out.

• 24:27Speaker 03

  But she says at one point, doesn't she, isn't there a bit where she says, you know, do you think you're being watched by ghosts or something like that?

• 24:33Speaker 02

  She says, do you think the dead come back and watch the living? Sometimes I wonder, sometimes I wonder if she, Rebecca, comes back here to Mandari and watches you and Mr. De Winter together.

• 24:43Speaker 03

  Yeah, that would really freak you out if someone said that to you and you were the second wife.

• 24:46Speaker 02

  Yeah, very unsettling, very unsettling. There's something in that, though, because Mrs. Danvers loved Rebecca of Heathcliff, you know, inviting Cathy to haunt him.

• 24:57Speaker 03

  Mrs. Danvers wants Rebecca to come and haunt them.

• 25:00Speaker 02

  Yeah, exactly.

• 25:01Speaker 03

  Mrs. Danvers is a complete head case, isn't she, really? I mean, she has been driven mad by her own obsession with Rebecca.

• 25:06Speaker 02

  Yeah. And I think by Rebecca's death as well.

• 25:08Speaker 03

  And she probably, you get the slight impression that the relationship between Mrs. Danvers and Rebecca was not entirely healthy, do you think?

• 25:15Speaker 02

  Codependent.

• 25:16Speaker 03

  Right, exactly. What about the house? You love the house, don't you?

• 25:19Speaker 02

  Yeah. So as you say, there's this West Wing, and this is like something from the Castle of Otranto or something, a very famous Gothic novel. It's a grand house full of dark secrets. And the interesting thing is, is that there is a contrast. So there is a sunny, light side to Mandari that the characters love, the narrator loves, kind of in the daytime. And it has a lot of dogs and tea times and wild flowers or whatever. And then there's something about this other half of it. And this is kind of the world of the unseen, the world haunted by Rebecca.

• 25:46Speaker 03

  You know, the mad thing is that this book came out only a few months apart from The Code of the Wusters.

• 25:50Speaker 02

  Such a strange thought, isn't it?

• 25:52Speaker 03

  And they're both set in country houses.

• 25:53Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 25:54Speaker 03

  So in Totley Towers, in The Code of the Wusters, where Bertie is having his adventures.

• 25:58Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 25:58Speaker 03

  I mean, this is like that, but you could use the same set for both, for both novels. But the cast's so different. And this is like the dark side of the country house idyll.

• 26:08Speaker 02

  Exactly. And then, you know, from the very beginning, the first line of the book, the first passage of the book is dedicated to Mandari. And it's like something from a dark fairy tale, you know, no smoke came from the chimney. Nature would come into her own again, little by little, in her stealthy, insidious way, and encroached upon the drive with long, tenacious fingers. The woods always a menace, even in the past, had triumphed in the end. And it's kind of curled gnarling trees creeping up into the house. You know right from the start that there is something haunted about the whole story. And I, as I, as we said earlier, no one can conjure an atmosphere like Daphne du Maurier. And I quite agree with Norman Collins, who wrote that Rebecca brilliantly creates a sense of atmosphere and suspense. And Mandari is as much an atmosphere as a tangible erection

• 26:51Speaker 02

  of stones and mortar. You know, it's almost something that could become synonymous with a certain vibe, a vibe, a certain feel.

• 26:58Speaker 03

  Yeah. And you mentioned already the sea. The sea is there the whole time. And the narrator says at one point, if I stood on the terrace and listened, I could hear the murmur of the sea below me, low and sullen, a dull, persistent sound that never ceased. I began to understand why some people could not bear the clamour of the sea. It has a mournful harping note sometimes, and the very persistence of it, that eternal roll and thunder and hiss, plays a jagged chew upon the nerves. So she arrives at the house and the house overwhelms her and intimidates her. And there's a class element to this, of course, which we'll probably come to.

• 27:32Speaker 02

  It's a little bit like, I remember I watched an interview with Emerald Fennell when she did Saltburn. And she said of that, that she wanted the house in that with its kind of strange secrets, its strange denizens, almost to become a character in itself. And she wanted the butler in that, almost to be like a fae spirit, hardly human, you know, the heart of the house. And that's a little bit like Danvers and Mandari in this. And then into this comes this interloper, this young naive interloper, who thinks that she can just become mistress of Mandari. But no, no, no, no, there already is a mistress of Mandari and she's going nowhere.

• 28:06Speaker 03

  So the narrator is so interesting. Do you know, this, this is, this is a massive indictment of me as a reader.

• 28:12Speaker 02

  No, another one.

• 28:12Speaker 03

  But it hadn't occurred to me until you pointed it out to me before when we were chatting, that the narrator is never named.

• 28:18Speaker 02

  She's never named.

• 28:20Speaker 03

  She presents herself as young, innocent, naive, I suppose.

• 28:27Speaker 02

  Clumsy.

• 28:29Speaker 03

  Yeah. I mean, she goes further. She, she is very open or appears to be open about her insecurities. She appears to be candid about how clumsy and how hapless and how nervous she is. She does think, you know, she, she talks about how she's dropping things, how she doesn't understand how to manage her relations with the servants. She is too formal, too obsequious to the servants. She's not casual and relaxed.

• 29:00Speaker 02

  But also in her dealings with their neighbours or whatever, she always, she overuses people's first names, you know, like a child who's been taught their manners and has been told, you know, it's someone's name when you say thank you. She also, whenever she's talking to anyone, this is a very English thing, she pats the dog relentlessly so that she doesn't have to speak to people, she speaks to the dog. And, you know, as you say, she's always spilling things, she's always dropping things, everything's always too big for her.

• 29:28Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 29:29Speaker 02

  Her role as the young child, the unknowing child is almost.

• 29:36Speaker 02

  I don't know, it's so overdone.

• 29:38Speaker 03

  Well, this is the question that occurs to you once you've read it, I think. Is she playing a part? Is it disingenuous, actually? Or is she trying, is she lying to you, the reader? I mean, the question about whether the narrator is reliable or not, we'll come back to. Let's assume that we're taking everything on trust. She's clearly from a different class to the others. She is at sea in this world. She doesn't shoot, she doesn't, she's not hunt and that, and people can't believe that.

• 30:04Speaker 02

  She can barely ride.

• 30:05Speaker 03

  She can barely ride and they're like, oh, you have to ride. And this is why she's anxious with the servants. Because she doesn't know how to manage servants. She doesn't have the tone of command, the casual relationship with them that somebody from that kind of landed aristocratic background would have. She doesn't, she's too middle class, basically.

• 30:23Speaker 02

  So at one point, she breaks something and rather than just say, oh, I broke something, you know, send it to London to get it fixed or whatever. She shamefacedly sweeps the crumbs into an envelope and hides it in a drawer. And then she's sort of chastised in front of the butler and Mrs. Danvers and Maxim himself. Every morning, you know, Danvers basically plays upon the fact that she's not of this world and she doesn't really know what she's doing. And she sends her these ridiculously sumptuous menus for lunch and dinner that she has to approve and go through. She doesn't have a clue.

• 30:53Speaker 03

  Yeah, exactly.

• 30:53Speaker 02

  And it's all, well, the former Mrs. DeWinter did this.

• 30:56Speaker 03

  Well, this is the thing. So the obsession, the servants keep saying, well, Mrs. DeWinter, I mean, she's Mrs. DeWinter now, but the servants keep saying, well, Mrs. DeWinter used to do things very differently. And that becomes more and more of an obsession with her. She was obsessed with Rebecca even before she arrived at Mandari, wasn't she? Because she was always conscious that Maxim had this kind of shadow hanging over him, the shadow of grief, and that she would never live up to the previous Mrs. DeWinter, who was, you know, incredibly talented, elegant, beautiful, you know, everybody loved her, a social star, all of this. But once she gets to Mandali, this becomes worse and worse.

• 31:39Speaker 03

  And basically, she's thinking about Rebecca. It affects her on every single page of the book.

• 31:42Speaker 02

  Yeah, this jealousy comes to absolutely consume her. And as we've already said, you know, Daphne de Maurier set out to write a book about jealousy. It was a great stimulus for her. And I think she does that brilliantly. The narrator describes at one point her jealousy for Rebecca as a demon living in her mind, whispering into her mind. And I think that's so well observed because that is how jealousy feels, you know? You try to tamp it down and it's like a poison that drips into you. So she relentlessly compares herself to Rebecca, who triumphs over her no matter what she does. And there's one scene in particular that kind of, that brings this all together, that embodies their, almost their competition between the two of them, that she could never, ever win. So she literally steps into Rebecca's shoes with terrible consequences.

• 32:27Speaker 02

  And this is the scene that you described, where Mrs. Danvers persuades her to dress as a beautiful portrait at Mandali, an ancestor of Maxim's called Caroline DeWinter. And this is the first time that the narrator kind of feels good about her role as mistress of the house. She gets quite excited. She decides that she's going to surprise everyone with her wonderful outfit.

• 32:51Speaker 03

  She's got a nice wig, she's got a white dress.

• 32:53Speaker 02

  She's got a lovely wig, she's got a nice dress. You know, you're planning an outfit forever, you feel really good about it. And then this scene is literal chills because it's everyone's worst nightmare, isn't it? You know, turning up somewhere and being the odd one out.

• 33:07Speaker 03

  Of course.

• 33:07Speaker 02

  So she, very excited, she gets to the top of the stairs, she's wearing a lovely white dress, she's looking very pretty. And then she starts walking down the staircase and it just, it's not at all as she expects. "I came forward to the head of the stairs and stood there, smiling, my hat in my hand, like the girl in the picture. I waited for the clapping and laughter that would follow as I walked slowly down the stairs. Nobody clapped, nobody moved. Beatrice, this is Maxim's sister, uttered a little cry and put her hand to her mouth. Maxim had not moved. There was no colour in his face, it was ash and white. Something was wrong. They had not understood. Why was Maxim looking like that? Why did they all stand like dummies, like people in a trance? Then Maxim moved forward to the stairs, his eyes never leaving my face.

• 33:50Speaker 02

  'What the hell do you think you're doing?' he asked, his eyes ablaze in anger." So it turns out that Mrs. Danvers has absolutely done her one and...

• 33:58Speaker 03

  Mrs. Danvers, who basically suggested the costume, did so because she knew Rebecca had worn it in her last appearance at the costume ball and that this will drive, this will drive Maxim mad. But also, it's such an interesting and revealing moment because she's effectively, she's dressed as Rebecca. She is, as you said, she's wearing Rebecca's, she's, you know, she's standing there in Rebecca's shoes. And she doesn't quite understand why Maxim has taken this quite so badly.

• 34:26Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 34:26Speaker 03

  Because for him, it's as if his second wife has transformed into the ghost of his first wife.

• 34:32Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 34:32Speaker 03

  And for him, as we will discuss in the second half, this is peculiarly unsettling. Well, they all feel like they've kind of gone mad. Madness kind of hangs over this. Like, he is, he's like a madman with rage. She is the demon in her head of jealousy has now, now completely consumes her.

• 34:51Speaker 02

  And that's the other thing about her. She actually has a very lurid, over vigorous imagination and it kind of comes to play, to play tricks on her. It allows her to inflate this obsession with Rebecca. And that reminded me of Catherine Moreland in Northend Graby, you know, who lets fancies get her carried away.

• 35:11Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 35:11Speaker 02

  And then I started to think, well, what if this, it's the imagination, it's her weakness, you know, human weakness to read into things, that, things that don't exist? What if that makes her an unreliable narrator? Because we're getting a version of events as she saw them in her obsessive, increasingly maddened mind. And then I suddenly thought, oh, well, as you said, well, what if her jealousy is actually spite and she's telling us a version of the story that makes her look a certain way and Rebecca look a certain way? Because she comes across as so honest and so sweet and so naive. And, I mean, how accurate is it? Is it a ruse? Is it a recreation?

• 35:52Speaker 02

  Because we have to remind ourselves that she is retelling the events that unfolded at Mandali in the first person, from her perspective in the present.

• 36:01Speaker 03

  Hmm.

• 36:01Speaker 02

  And the contrast between her voice in the present and the sense we get of her as a young girl is so stark that it's very intriguing because you start to wonder, is this cynical, observant, older woman, is she recreating history as she would have wished it to be?

• 36:17Speaker 03

  Such a good point, actually, because you're so right that the narrator of this story is not innocent, clumsy and naive. The narrator is very knowing, very skillful. She's brilliant, she's very observant, she's brilliant at withholding and then releasing information to keep us in suspense.

• 36:39Speaker 02

  And she makes us feel like we're in her confidence because she's telling us about sort of such a, such a troubled version of herself, an anxious version of herself, that we sympathise instinctively. She's very persuasive and she has power by not letting us into the secret of her name.

• 36:56Speaker 03

  You've written down here, Agatha Christie.

• 36:57Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 36:58Speaker 03

  Was like, come on, what's her name?

• 37:00Speaker 02

  Yeah, she was like, this is ridiculous, what's her name? And apparently, Daphne de Maurier wasn't very pleased and she, you know, she was like, you're just not getting it.

• 37:07Speaker 03

  I think Agatha Christie is not getting it, actually, because I think.

• 37:09Speaker 02

  I think you're right.

• 37:10Speaker 03

  The fact that we don't know her name, it's actually, the more you think about it, the more unsettling it is.

• 37:15Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 37:16Speaker 03

  That she withholds the most single, most important piece of information there is about anybody. I mean, you know, your name is the most important thing about you in many ways.

• 37:23Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 37:23Speaker 03

  Why don't we know that? And actually, if the clumsy person who's always upsetting teacups and like getting in a mess with the menu and doesn't know how to talk to the servants.

• 37:31Speaker 02

  It's like a pastiche.

• 37:33Speaker 03

  Yeah, exactly, it is a bit of a pastiche. Is she, is she misleading us about herself and also about Rebecca? The view we get of Rebecca is Rebecca never speaks, Rebecca is never seen, you know, is Rebecca, who dominates the book, is entirely defined by the narrator's kind of vision of her.

• 37:55Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 37:56Speaker 03

  And once you start thinking like that, you start thinking, well, can I trust anything in the book? Or am I just hearing the, is this just the statement for the defence of somebody who actually has connived her way into? You know, you can tell the story the other way around, right? About a social climber who sees a grieving widower and thinks, I'd like some of that, I'd like that house, yeah.

• 38:17Speaker 02

  It's the, it's the, is Nellie the villain in Wuthering Heights thing all over again, I guess.

• 38:21Speaker 03

  It is.

• 38:21Speaker 02

  But the other interesting thing is, is that she's clearly very in love with her husband, Maxim.

• 38:26Speaker 03

  Well, she says she is.

• 38:27Speaker 02

  Yeah, she says she is. But he actually, it struck me this time rereading it, he in many ways is a very deceitful, like, quite unattractive character.

• 38:38Speaker 03

  He is.

• 38:39Speaker 02

  But on that ambiguous note, I think we should come to a break. And then after the break, we'll meet Maxim, we'll meet Mrs. Danvers, we'll meet Rebecca herself and we'll kind of, we'll dig into the big reveal at the heart of this novel.

• 38:54Speaker 02

  This episode is brought to you by the Folio Society.

• 38:57Speaker 03

  In Daphne du Maurier's book Rebecca, the most powerful character, the titular character is already dead. But what begins as a romance soon turns into a story of jealousy, of obsession and of mounting dread.

• 39:13Speaker 02

  And Folio's edition carries this dark elegance into the reading experience. Beautifully bound and with illustrations by DG Smith, it brings Mandari close.

• 39:24Speaker 03

  And that's the power that Rebecca has over the whole novel.

• 39:28Speaker 02

  That is what Folio does so well. It takes a favourite story and makes the book itself part of the pleasure. The look, the feel, the whole reading experience.

• 39:38Speaker 03

  So Folio's Rebecca is available now. Find your favourite story at foliosociety.com/thebookclub. That's foliosociety.com/thebookclub.

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• 40:53Speaker 04

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• 41:27Speaker 03

  Welcome back, everybody, to the book club. Now, before we get back into Rebecca, just a quick reminder, don't forget to sign up to our free newsletter, Book Club Notes. You get it every Saturday. There are little witicisms from Tabby. Is that not enough? Well, actually, no, because there are loads of tips about further reading.

• 41:46Speaker 02

  Tantalising insights from Dominic.

• 41:48Speaker 03

  Tantalising insights, exactly. There are tantalising insights from listeners, actually. So listeners write in with their thoughts. We give advance warning about the books we're doing, all of these kinds of things. Now, you can sign up for this at thebookclubhq.com and it will arrive on Saturday and is, of course, completely free.

• 42:08Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 42:09Speaker 03

  Now, let's get into the story again. And actually, we were going to talk about the characters, but Tabby, you wanted to say a word about nostalgia, didn't you? Because you think that's very important. Of course, it is important, because the book begins with the narrator looking back and dreaming about Mandari.

• 42:24Speaker 02

  That opening line is so famous. It's one of the most famous opening lines in literature.

• 42:29Speaker 03

  It's, "Last night, I dreamt I went to Mandari again."

• 42:32Speaker 02

  I went to Mandari, yeah.

• 42:33Speaker 03

  "I went to Mandari again." And the "again," is that because she's dreaming about it all the time? Is that, again, more obsessiveness, that she's constantly dreaming about Mandari? Because Mandari is such an obsession for her, and this sense of loss runs right through the whole book, doesn't it? The other characters feel they've lost Rebecca, but she feels like she's lost this world that she has built up in her mind to be all-consuming. The country house, the country life, all of that kind of thing.

• 43:03Speaker 02

  But also the line that, you know, so she, in her, in her dream, walked up the driveway and comes upon it, and it's all overgrown. So instantly, there's that, it's like coming upon a witch's castle in a fairy tale.

• 43:15Speaker 03

  It is. But you know what else is, well, interesting now, you think about this one line, there's so much in it. She's not dreaming that she's in Mandari.

• 43:22Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 43:22Speaker 03

  She's dreaming that she goes to it. In other words, that she is always the outsider, the intruder.

• 43:27Speaker 02

  Always the outsider. But then she says...

• 43:28Speaker 03

  She's not looking out the windows at the sea, she's walking up through the woods.

• 43:32Speaker 02

  But then she makes it her own, but actually not her own. She makes it hers and someone else's. "There was our Mandari, secretive and silent, as it had always been, the grey stone shining in the moonlight of my dream." And I think that definitely captures something about what Daphne du Maurier must have felt when she first stumbled upon that.

• 43:49Speaker 03

  Oh, the house.

• 43:50Speaker 02

  Delapidated house, yeah. So we know right from the beginning, there's an air of mystery around this place. There's something unknown going on. We know that something has been lost. And so instantly, we're in. She's tugged us in. But the hour that she refers to there, that is Maxim de Winter, her husband. So tell us a little bit about him, because he is a, certainly quite a mysterious character.

• 44:15Speaker 03

  "Mysterious" is putting it mildly. So she meets Maxim when she's on the Cocteau des Eures, and she's a companion to Mrs. Van Hopper, or whatever she's called, this sort of...

• 44:23Speaker 02

  Terrible person.

• 44:25Speaker 03

  Sort of large, American lady that she's, that she is a companion for, paid companion. And Van Hopper, I think it is, isn't it? And Mrs. Van Hopper says of him, "An attractive creature, but queer-tempered, I should think, difficult to know." And the interesting thing is that Mrs. Van Hopper is presented to us as an absolute idiot and a terrible woman. But Mrs. Van Hopper is right. Maxim is...

• 44:48Speaker 02

  Quite knowing.

• 44:49Speaker 03

  Yeah, there is something very dark about Maxim. He is aloof, he's very self-assured, he is kind of unknowable. There's a part of him that always seems shielded from our narrator. Now, of course, there is a way that you could present this character. She presents him to herself as handsome, you know, dark, an older man, urbane, you know, self-assured, all of these things. Another way of telling the story is, here is this widower who has gone to the south of France. He's basically picked up a much, much younger woman who is completely enthralled to him. He has decided to make her his wife. He brings her back home.

• 45:30Speaker 03

  And then, you know, she's basically like a toy. She's a pet for him. Because even the way he proposes, she says, you know, she's slightly, you can tell she's thrilled when he proposes to her in the hotel in France, but he does it in such an offhand, casual way.

• 45:48Speaker 02

  It's such a bad proposal. It's so, it's oddly depressing.

• 45:52Speaker 03

  Yeah, it is. It's so underwhelming. She's built it up in her mind, maybe, you know, Maxim. She doesn't, she doesn't ever think seriously he's going to propose. And then suddenly he does, but he basically tosses the remark aside, away, kind of at breakfast, doesn't he? Amid the marmalade and the coffee and the tangerine. And it's not a sort of, and she says at one point, "Well, maybe, you know, the stuff about going down on one knee, and that never really happens. And this is more authentic and all of this kind of thing." And then after that, he never really talks to her about their relationship or about her. He doesn't ask her questions about herself. He doesn't meet her halfway. He just sort of expects her to fit into his life in a Rebecca-shaped hole.

• 46:34Speaker 02

  And he's constantly, whenever she questions anything, which is very, very rare, he always says, "Oh, you silly little fool."

• 46:39Speaker 03

  God, yeah, I know.

• 46:40Speaker 02

  "My little darling." And she says, kind of slightly disappointedly, mournfully at one point, "Perhaps, once, perhaps, when she had gone, Mrs. Van Hopper had gone, he would at last talk to me about loving me, about being happy. Up to now, there'd been no time." And anyway, those things are not easily said. They must wait their moment. You know, she's trying to make excuses for him, and she makes excuses for him throughout the book. I mean, I think he's quite unkind to her.

• 47:05Speaker 03

  He is. I mean, let's be honest. If he's not going to talk about those things now, he's definitely not going to do it later on.

• 47:11Speaker 03

  And then they, they get to Mandari, and rather than kind of allowing her into his confidence, meeting her on a sort of level of mutual trust, he almost deliberately keeps her in the dark. And he says to her, "I mean, this is your ultimate kind of red flag, I think, Tabby. A husband is not so very different from a father, after all. There is a certain type of knowledge I prefer you not to have. It's better kept under lock and key. So that's that. Now eat up your peaches and don't ask me any more questions, or shall I put you in the corner?"

• 47:39Speaker 02

  Oh, God.

• 47:40Speaker 03

  Wow, I mean...

• 47:42Speaker 02

  That is the ultimate ick, isn't it? That's terrible.

• 47:45Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's a shocker. That is a shocker.

• 47:47Speaker 02

  I was told, go into the corner and eat your peaches.

• 47:51Speaker 02

  It wouldn't go well.

• 47:52Speaker 03

  So the narrator doesn't really have the friend and companion that she wants in Maxim. She feels like, you know, he's abandoned her once they get to the house. And he's abandoned her to be the prey of this sinister, skull-like, ghostly character, Mrs. Danvers.

• 48:07Speaker 02

  Yeah, I love it. So Helen Dunmore, who wrote the introduction to the foreplay side of this, she described her as a skull-faced sinister figure of nightmare, and she's not wrong. She almost is not human. There's almost something, I don't know, demonic about her.

• 48:21Speaker 03

  Agreed.

• 48:22Speaker 02

  Kristen Scott Thomas, by the way, plays her exquisitely in the 2020 adaptation of this book, which otherwise isn't very good.

• 48:29Speaker 03

  Which is otherwise rubbish, yeah.

• 48:29Speaker 02

  It's rubbish otherwise, but she is superb. And she is every inch the Gothic villain. She is a brilliant housekeeper, but all the while is working psychologically to undermine and unsettle our nameless narrator. So, for instance, as we've said, she encourages her to wear the costume at the ball. At one point, she actually encourages her to jump out of a window and commit suicide.

• 48:53Speaker 03

  She does. That's a mad scene, isn't it?

• 48:55Speaker 02

  But why is it that she takes against her so much? Because she loved, she adored, almost with a slightly sexual fervour, I would say.

• 49:05Speaker 03

  Agreed.

• 49:05Speaker 02

  Rebecca. She holds her up as an idol of womanhood of all the narrator can never be. And she actually, interestingly, defends a portion of Rebecca's nature that we will learn about later on, that no one else will stand for. You know, she loves her for every single facet of her personality, her flaws and everything like that.

• 49:25Speaker 03

  Big spoiler alert now, and more coming. We find out that Rebecca was not faithful to Maxim DeWinter, that she was having affairs all the time.

• 49:36Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 49:37Speaker 03

  You know, she was picking up and discarding men casually like toys. And Mrs. Danvers says, well, so what? She says, well, and what if she did? She had a right to amuse herself, hadn't she? Love-making was a game with her, only a game. And Mrs. Danvers says it with this passionate fervour. And the narrator seems to be very shocked by this and says, clearly Rebecca was an absolute monster. She wasn't the paragon after all. But Mrs. Danvers will not hear a word against Rebecca and effectively has turned Mandari into a temple to her former mistress. And she's always, I mean, you're right, she's always lurking in the shadows like a ghost. There's a scene, isn't there, where...

• 50:22Speaker 02

  It's so creepy.

• 50:23Speaker 03

  The narrator is exploring the house. She goes into the west wing, which has been shut off. And then, "I heard a step behind me and turning round, I saw Mrs. Danvers. I shall never forget the expression on her face, triumphant, gloating, excited in a strange, unhealthy way."

• 50:39Speaker 02

  You're enjoying this much too much, by the way.

• 50:41Speaker 03

  It's so well-written.

• 50:42Speaker 02

  Rein it in.

• 50:43Speaker 03

  "In a strange, unhealthy way. I felt very frightened." "Is anything the matter, madam?" she says. This is literally like what it's like doing a podcast with you, Tabby.

• 50:53Speaker 02

  Constantly looking over your shoulder. I never like my excitement to be pure and unadulterated. I like to be slightly twisted.

• 51:02Speaker 03

  Creepy about it.

• 51:03Speaker 02

  You've stubbed your toe.

• 51:05Speaker 03

  Yeah, well, the question with Mrs. Danvers, again, we only know this because the narrator tells us. Like, Mrs. Danvers might actually be a really decent, dutiful, faithful servant, true to her mistress's memory, who is being reduced by a narrator, no? Or do you think I'm reading too much into that?

• 51:20Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, the thing is, she's so, she's almost camp in how horrific she is and how creepy she is, that you slightly wonder, has the narrator transformed a woman who was just, you know, very, very fond of her mistress? They had a really close relationship, she was also her lady's maid, into this monster of nightmare? Because, as I say, she's almost inhuman in how horrific she is. And also how visceral she is in describing the death of Rebecca. And, but I think that almost suggests to me that she was driven mad by it. Because she says at one point, "Her fingers lightened on my arm. She bent down to me, her skull's face close, her eyes dark, her dark eyes searching mine. The rocks had battered her to bits, you know. Her beautiful face unrecognisable and both arms gone.

• 52:05Speaker 02

  Mr. DeWinter identified her. He went up to Edgcombe to do it. He went quite alone." So if that's someone you love, why do you want to dig into, you know, the physical details of it? I think because it slightly drove her mad. Or, as we say, it's because our narrator is trying to turn her into a demon to make herself look more innocent.

• 52:27Speaker 03

  Well, if our narrator can't be trusted, then, which is a really interesting...

• 52:32Speaker 02

  Possibility.

• 52:32Speaker 03

  Possibility, then that also unsettles the way we think about Rebecca herself.

• 52:36Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 52:37Speaker 03

  So Rebecca, I mean, she's, the title of the book is Rebecca. Rebecca is dead throughout the book. She never speaks, we never see her. You know, she's just a creature of story. You know, we just hear stories about her. But she, in a weird way, is a more identifiable character than our narrator is. You know, we know what she looks like and we never know what the narrator looks like.

• 53:00Speaker 02

  Yeah, she hangs over everything, she's everywhere. And so, I mean, right from the beginning, we're encouraged to think, this is her story. Her name is on the front cover and our narrator is nameless. So, you know, our narrator is like a conduit for her. And she is almost, she's more domineering, more charismatic, more passionate as a ghost than our narrator, the corporeal form of our narrator. She's almost supernaturally feminine, but while mastering kind of the boldness of a man. She is beautiful, she's funny, she's clever, she's raven-haired. The narrator is kind of pallid and she, we're told she has this long, lank hair. So, and this contrast is surely exaggerated in the telling

• 53:45Speaker 02

  because Rebecca comes to take on the role of something, like almost the beautiful queen in Snow White.

• 53:49Speaker 03

  You've made this point, haven't you, in your notes, that there's a fairy tale quality to this? The narrator is really leaning into, the narrator is the sort of the outsider.

• 53:58Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 53:58Speaker 03

  The Snow White character.

• 53:59Speaker 02

  Sweet little snow with a heart of gold.

• 54:02Speaker 03

  Yeah, when we're talking about her walking up the drive towards the big house and all that, it's a very fairy tale scene through the woods.

• 54:07Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 54:08Speaker 03

  And Rebecca as the supremely, you know, elegant, well-born villainess that you see in so many kind of fairy tales or Disney films or whatever.

• 54:19Speaker 02

  But it's important to stress that, I mean, we are doing this episode, having obviously read the book, but throughout the majority of the book, three quarters of the book almost, we believe, as the young narrator believes, that Rebecca is perfect. She's the perfect wife and that Maxim, and also everyone, everything we hear about her, as you say, she never appears, she never says a single word in the book. We're only told about her. But we also are encouraged to believe that Maxim DeWinter, the narrator's husband, Rebecca's original husband, is still in love with her. You know, it's so broken by her death that he almost brings in the narrator to marry him because he's lonely and he needs consolation, and he never really loves her.

• 55:02Speaker 03

  And this is what obsesses the narrator. And actually, at the height of her despair, she says, doesn't she? "He didn't belong to me at all, he belonged to Rebecca. He still thought about Rebecca, he would never love me because of Rebecca. Rebecca was still mistress of Mandari, Rebecca was still Mrs. DeWinter. Rebecca always Rebecca, I shall never be rid of Rebecca."

• 55:21Speaker 02

  That name, the way that it pounds you, the, it just, that's such a brilliant piece of writing because it hammers it home to you, the reader.

• 55:29Speaker 03

  It does.

• 55:30Speaker 02

  You get stuck in Rebecca.

• 55:31Speaker 03

  But now let's turn to the big twist. Okay, so if you haven't read the book, we are now going to give away the big twist. So basically, I want you to continue listening, but then not complain afterwards that we spoiled it for you.

• 55:42Speaker 02

  That would be great, yeah.

• 55:43Speaker 03

  So, okay, the twist, Tabby, tell us what happens.

• 55:47Speaker 02

  So, that ba-ba-boom moment that Daphne de Mauro wrote about, the narrator is contemplating whether to commit suicide. And then there's some sort of a chaos unfolding on the beach. And it turns out that there has been a shipwreck. And a diver, exploring it, has discovered Rebecca's boat, the boat that she died in. But not only that, she has discovered, the diver has discovered Rebecca's corpse. And remember that Mrs. Danvers has told the narrator that Maxim went personally to identify the body that was found as Rebecca's. He said, yes, that is Rebecca, but no, Rebecca's body has been found anew. And finally, Maxim admits to the narrator that he loathed Rebecca.

• 56:30Speaker 02

  He said she was cruel, she was malevolent, she had affairs. They kept up this mirage of perfection to the outside world, but he hated her. And then, this had all culminated in a scene where Rebecca had taunted him and said to him that she may be pregnant with another man's child and she would make him raise it. And so, in the heat of the moment, Maxim shot her and carried her body to the sea and sunk her boat with her in it. So, and actually, all along, he really loved the narrator. And Maxim, the way that his actions are described, murdering his potentially pregnant wife and then dumping her body and never, ever fessing up to it.

• 57:10Speaker 02

  The way that that's told to us, again, calls to mind the possibility of an unreliable narrator because she totally saps the horror of what has happened from it. It's lifeless, it's barely important.

• 57:23Speaker 03

  Well, here's the thing, they're describing an act of tremendous violence. And, you know, the worst thing you can do, murdering somebody.

• 57:30Speaker 02

  He says at one point, "You forget how much blood there is."

• 57:33Speaker 03

  Well, here is the thing, that line is so revealing, I think, if you're going to take a more heretical view of the book. "I had forgotten," said Maxim, and his voice was slow now, tired, without expression. "I'd forgotten that when you shot a person, there was so much blood."

• 57:48Speaker 02

  So he's killed before.

• 57:49Speaker 03

  So he's killed before. I mean, wow, that's, I mean, that's, you miss that when you first read it.

• 57:55Speaker 02

  Probably during the war, but...

• 57:57Speaker 03

  Well, you don't know, though. Helen Dunmore, in her introduction essay, drew attention to that. I was like, yes, I did miss that when I first read it. I'd forgotten, in other words, I would know. And so from this point onwards, our view of Rebecca completely changes. We now see Rebecca as this sexual deviant, promiscuous, monstrous, breaking her marriage vows, manipulative, horrible, a sort of, it's the ultimate sort of fantasy of the demonic woman.

• 58:27Speaker 02

  Which brings us back to Jane Eyre, because at one point Maxim describes her as being like an animal and that's just how Mr. Rochester describes Bertha, his wife that he keeps in the attic in Jane Eyre.

• 58:37Speaker 03

  I mean, I forget, Maxim is a murderer.

• 58:38Speaker 02

  Yeah, but I think we can also, we can also have Maxim as a villain, Rebecca as a femme fatale, and the narrator as a young woman who just loves Maxim at any cost. But you could also have it that the narrator is in it with Maxim and is twisting Rebecca in order to defend the husband that she loves.

• 59:00Speaker 03

  Yes, you can, absolutely. You can see each, you can see any of the three of them as the true villain of the piece. But because it's narrated by, well... The story is told by the narrator, we are kind of complicit in this story, aren't we? And actually, it's very cleverly constructed so that while you're reading it, when you're in the moment, all you want is for Maxim to get away with it, don't you?

• 59:23Speaker 02

  You do. You're really worried at one point because he comes pretty close to being arrested. But then he manages to justify Rebecca's death. He manages to say that it was a suicide. Because when they go to visit the doctor that Rebecca had been visiting, we think to confirm her pregnancy, it turns out that she had cancer and that there is a chance that she almost provoked Maxim into shooting her because she didn't want to die a long, slow, painful, undignified death. And I think there is something admirable in that for Rebecca. And it means that no matter which way you see the story, Rebecca triumphs because she engineers her death and I think probably hoping that it will mean that Maxim is arrested.

• 1:00:03Speaker 03

  Yeah. And so for those people who have read the book, obviously those final 50 pages are brilliantly done.

• 1:00:08Speaker 02

  Thrilling. Oh, my gosh.

• 1:00:10Speaker 03

  This absolute sense of tension because basically the person with whom Rebecca was having an affair called Jack Favel.

• 1:00:15Speaker 02

  Sorry, can we quickly talk about that? Because he's her first cousin. I feel uncomfortable with that. I don't know about you. Am I buttoned up?

• 1:00:23Speaker 03

  I'm not really in touch with my cousins, so the thought of having an affair with them has never really, I mean, it's not impossible, but it's never really impinged on my consciousness.

• 1:00:32Speaker 02

  This is my, this is the point. It's still a bit weird.

• 1:00:34Speaker 03

  I suppose it is a bit weird.

• 1:00:36Speaker 02

  And also, we're told that he's sort of red-faced and sloppy-lipped and a massive drinker. I think that if your cousin is red-faced, sloppy-lipped and a massive drinker and your cousin, I think maybe don't have an affair with him. Maybe find a more attractive, less closely related individual.

• 1:00:50Speaker 03

  But the thing is, again, Jack Favel, who is the villain, he's the villain in the final 100 pages of the book. He finds out Maxim's secret. He wants to blackmail them. There is another way to tell his story, which is that actually he is loyal, he is loyal to the memory of a murdered woman who he did genuinely love, both as a cousin and as a and as a bedmate.

• 1:01:10Speaker 02

  And as a lover.

• 1:01:11Speaker 03

  Yeah, as a lover. Thank you for that, Tabby.

• 1:01:13Speaker 02

  Well, it's important to pull out all the Gothic horror.

• 1:01:16Speaker 03

  It is. Was that Gothic horror, was it, the way you said that?

• 1:01:19Speaker 02

  A lover.

• 1:01:19Speaker 03

  Yeah, it was pretty horrible. But he could be the good guy of the story, right?

• 1:01:24Speaker 02

  Ah, yeah. I feel like that's working a bit hard, though.

• 1:01:26Speaker 03

  No, though, because the way Maxim is able to get away with this.

• 1:01:30Speaker 02

  God, you're livid.

• 1:01:31Speaker 03

  I am furious. The way Maxim is able to get away with it is that he's posh.

• 1:01:35Speaker 02

  Yes, this is true, actually. This is true. He's untouchable because he's so high status that he is untouchable. So if it was a man, one of his servants or whatever, for instance, one of his servants almost does get arrested for breaking a statue, Maxim murders his wife and totally gets away with it.

• 1:01:52Speaker 03

  Because basically Colonel, whatever his name is.

• 1:01:54Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:01:55Speaker 03

  He trusts Maxim. He wobbles at times because you can see the evidence mounting up against him. But you can see, but he's also thinking, he's a good chap, he's one of us, he wouldn't possibly do this. So.

• 1:02:06Speaker 02

  Yeah, bloody good bacon, bloody good port. But then the thing is as well, whether or not you go down this line of reading the book, you know, wherein the Maxim is the villain, Rebecca is hard done by. In order to achieve the happy ending, the narrator's happy ending, this sees her with Maxim and Maxim a free man, she has to collude in the murder. And that is undoubtedly what happens.

• 1:02:30Speaker 03

  Well, in covering up the murder, you mean?

• 1:02:32Speaker 02

  In covering up the murder, exactly. By stand, in standing by him. It's a bit like, yeah, in standing by him. But then this isn't the only twist. Daphne du Maurier gives us more because then there is the absolute ending. And I think this time you should, you should tell people what happens.

• 1:02:48Speaker 03

  So we knew this was coming, didn't we, from the beginning in a weird way? At least I could see it coming.

• 1:02:54Speaker 02

  We bring it back to that opening line. Last night I went back to Mandaly.

• 1:02:57Speaker 03

  Yeah. Last night I dreamed I went to Mandaly again. It seemed to me I stood by the iron gate, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I looked through and in her dream, Mandaly is rusting and it's been consumed by the woods and all of that kind of stuff. So we know that they've lost Mandaly in some way. And they're driving back after the, after Maxim has been cleared by the doctor, because the doctor's told Colonel, whatever, that there's, that Rebecca had cancer. So the Colonel says, oh, well, she must have killed herself. Maxim's got away with it and the narrator's got away with it. And then as they, they're driving faster and faster to get back to Mandaly. And I was thinking to myself, this is like the final couple of minutes of one of those films where you think it would have faded out and we would have had the credits by now if it was going to

• 1:03:42Speaker 03

  be a happy ending. Clearly, there is something coming because there's this sense of gathering tension. The faster they drive, the closer they get to the house. And then, "The road to Mandaly lay ahead. There was no moon. The sky above our heads was inky black, but the sky on the horizon was not dark at all. It was shot with crimson like a splash of blood and the ashes blew towards us with the salt wind from the sea." It's beautiful writing, actually, really controlled, well-judged writing.

• 1:04:12Speaker 02

  I think that about all of her writing. It's always very embroidered and rich, but so well-controlled.

• 1:04:18Speaker 03

  Yeah. Jack Favel went out near the end to make a phone call, didn't he? And he was obviously ringing his ally, Mrs. Danvers, who has set fire to the house.

• 1:04:28Speaker 02

  Her final revenge for her beloved mistress. And you, and in a way, you know, for the untouchable Maxim de Winter, you know, it's the one thing that she can do to undermine him.

• 1:04:39Speaker 03

  Because all he cared about was Mandaly.

• 1:04:42Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:04:43Speaker 03

  So this is a nod to Jane Eyre, isn't it? Because this is what happens to, what's the house in Jane Eyre, Tabby?

• 1:04:47Speaker 02

  Thornfield Hall. And actually, we're doing Jane Eyre on the show soon. So I guess we've just spoiled Jane Eyre, too.

• 1:04:53Speaker 03

  Well, it's an old book.

• 1:04:54Speaker 02

  It's an old book.

• 1:04:55Speaker 03

  So it's a nod to Jane Eyre. But also, this now means, A, Mandaly, the one thing he cared about, is lost to him. But Mandaly will forever belong to the woman he murdered, to Rebecca.

• 1:05:06Speaker 02

  They basically, they managed to exorcise themselves of Rebecca's ghost because Rebecca lives in Mandaly. So they are free from Rebecca's ghost. They are free from the law. But they've actually, in freeing themselves, had to hand Mandaly over to Rebecca forever. And in losing Mandaly, Maxim loses his status, his sense of self. So he is reduced too. Because we also get an interesting sense in the present tense, when our narrator, you know, when she is saying, oh, and I remember this, and when we sit together in the Mediterranean sun or whatever it may be, you get the sense that their status is slightly shifted.

• 1:05:39Speaker 03

  So true, Tabby.

• 1:05:40Speaker 02

  That now she is on top. And it's basically losing Mandaly that has allowed her to finally conquer her husband.

• 1:05:48Speaker 03

  Such a good point. Because he is absent. He is a nothing presence.

• 1:05:54Speaker 02

  Dead eyes.

• 1:05:55Speaker 03

  Yeah, he's just hanging around and you get a sense that he is a reduced shell of a man. But maybe another way of presenting this is the narrator has won. She's got what she wants. She's got him under her control.

• 1:06:07Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:06:07Speaker 03

  Wow.

• 1:06:08Speaker 02

  I think it's very important that we rate this.

• 1:06:11Speaker 03

  Yeah, in what?

• 1:06:12Speaker 02

  On the same, on the right scale.

• 1:06:15Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:06:16Speaker 02

  And I played around with a bunch of ideas. I had fun with it.

• 1:06:19Speaker 03

  You spent too much time thinking about this.

• 1:06:21Speaker 02

  Literally, I had two pages of notes, 10 pages of ideas for the rating system. I think we should rate it out of creepily sexually infatuated housekeepers.

• 1:06:30Speaker 03

  Brilliant. So I'm going to give it nine out of 10.

• 1:06:33Speaker 02

  Nice.

• 1:06:35Speaker 03

  And I'm going to, why am I talking a mark? I'm talking a mark purely because I think that it's melodramatic. It's very, very melodramatic. I don't mind that, but it doesn't quite hit. Yeah, I'm going to reserve 10s for the absolute peak of the literary art.

• 1:06:52Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:06:52Speaker 03

  And so this is a notch below that. However, in terms of what it does, it is absolutely brilliantly done. I mean, V S Pritchett saying it would be here today, gone tomorrow is mad.

• 1:07:04Speaker 02

  Yeah. What a fool.

• 1:07:05Speaker 03

  Well, he was, do you know what? He was, he was one of the greatest short story writers that ever lived. But in this case, it's completely wrong. It is so well-written. It does remind me in places of the control and the discipline of Agatha Christie, who I also love. But it's, it's actually richer than an Agatha Christie. It's much more layered. The unreliable narrator is so, I love, you know, Tabby, I'm obsessed with unreliable narrators.

• 1:07:26Speaker 02

  I know you are. Some people, I was speaking to someone the other day that said that they loathe an unreliable narrator because they feel what's the point in reading it. But I know what you mean. It's endlessly intriguing, isn't it?

• 1:07:36Speaker 03

  Also, everybody you ever speak to is an unreliable narrator. No?

• 1:07:40Speaker 02

  That was so profound. Thank you.

• 1:07:41Speaker 03

  Thanks. Okay, well, that's what I'm here for. So, yeah, I'm going to give it nine out of 10. I think it's terrific. And if you haven't read it, I could not recommend it. It's the perfect summer read.

• 1:07:50Speaker 02

  I'm also going to give it nine. I enjoyed every single second of reading it, even the second time around. The, the characters are wonderfully wrought. The pacing is brilliant. It's thrilling. The big reveal is genuinely shocking. It has everything, romance, mystery, murder, Gothic undertones. And I think the writing is beautiful and perfectly judged.

• 1:08:10Speaker 03

  Perfect.

• 1:08:11Speaker 02

  Do not forget, dear listener, to join our own secretive and mysterious haunted household and sign up for our beloved book club notes. And this is our wonderful, wonderful newsletter, where you get kind of deep dives into the book, you get some witty comments, repartee between Dominic and I. You can write your own views. You can give it your own ratings. You can let us know what you thought of it. You know, you can interact with other listeners. It's just.

• 1:08:36Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's the best thing ever.

• 1:08:37Speaker 02

  It's the Mandaly of the book club.

• 1:08:40Speaker 03

  It's genuinely the best thing that ever.

• 1:08:41Speaker 02

  Dominic and I haunted.

• 1:08:42Speaker 03

  It's the best thing that ever happens to you on a Saturday, Tabby, when that drops in your inbox.

• 1:08:46Speaker 02

  Yeah, totally.

• 1:08:48Speaker 03

  Right. Okay. So what's coming up on the show? We have next week, an absolute tip-top banger of a book, Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov, one of my very favourite writers and favourite books. We have Lord of the Flies by William Golding, A Month in the Country by J L Carr, American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis, Charlotte Bronson's Jane Eyre, Ian Fleming's Goldfinger, Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar, Fyodor Dostoevsky's White Nights, The Shining by Stephen King. Bye-bye, everybody. Thank you for listening.

• 1:09:17Speaker 02

  Bye.

• 1:09:26Speaker 05

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• 1:09:56Speaker 06

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