Our unnamed narrator is a woman in her early twenties, carrying out a menial and pretty unrewarding job as personal assistant, companion and general dogsbody to the dreadful Mrs Van Hopper, who is rich, brash, American and generally frightful. Into their orbit in the Monte Carlo hotel where they are currently staying comes Maxim de Winter, fortysomething, slim, handsome, but troubled in a moody and - hey - slightly sexy way. Once Mrs Van Hopper has been conveniently removed from the field of play for a couple of weeks by a well-timed bout of illness our narrator and Mr de Winter find themselves mutually at a loose end and end up spending some time together. He is twenty years older than her and a bit prone to mysterious periods of enigmatic silence, but he evidently finds her company refreshing and ends up asking her to marry him (and ditch Mrs Van Hopper into the bargain).
After a low-key wedding the new couple return to England. But where will they live? Well, it just happens that Maxim has a mahoosive country house called Manderley in south-west England (probably Cornwall but never explicitly identified as such). So the new Mr and Mrs de Winter rock up there in their fancy motor car and move in. Gargantuan house, hot and cold running servants, all the pâté you can eat, plus extensive grounds and access to a private cove and harbour - what's not to like? Well, a few things, actually: most significantly the lingering influence of Maxim's first wife, Rebecca, who drowned off the coast nearby a year or so earlier and the remnants of whose presence can still be felt around the house, in things like the decor and menu choices but more directly in the form of Mrs Danvers, Manderley's housekeeper and dominating presence among the staff, and who (it soon becomes clear) had a very close relationship with Rebecca and was utterly devoted to her.
A more assertive character might take a new broom to all this stuff and put their own stamp on the place, but the new Mrs de Winter is a slightly shy young woman and is a bit intimidated by the whole affair, and by Mrs Danvers in particular. Indeed it soon becomes apparent that Mrs Danvers' devotion to her former mistress may have made the short but significant journey from devotion to obsession - having set up home in Manderley's east wing, Mrs de Winter discovers that Maxim and Rebecca's former rooms in the west wing have been kept by Mrs Danvers in pristine condition exactly as Rebecca left them on the day she died: dust-free, clothes in the wardrobe, fresh flowers, nightdress laid out on the bed.
Rebecca's continuing influence seems to extend to Maxim as well, though, who is occasionally remote and uncommunicative. As a consequence the subject of Rebecca is never raised around the house, and tension and mutual misunderstanding continue. Is Maxim still in love with Rebecca? Does he regret his hasty second marriage? Will anyone actually talk to each other and find out? Things come to a head when the de Winters agree to host a fancy-dress ball at Manderley and Mrs de Winter is manipulated by Mrs Danvers into commissioning a costume resembling one of the de Winter ancestors, only to find that it is an exact replica of something Rebecca wore shortly before she died and that her husband now refuses to speak to her for the remainder of the evening.
More important real-world considerations intervene the following day when a large ship runs aground on the rocks near Manderley. That of itself doesn't directly affect the inhabitants of the house, but when a diver goes down to assess the damage to the ship's hull he discovers Rebecca's boat, the one she went out in on the night she drowned, on the sea-bed nearby; not only that but the remains of a body are in the cabin.
The de Winters (their disagreement of the previous night seemingly forgotten) discuss this new development: who could the body be? Rebecca was supposedly alone on the night she died and her body was washed up, battered by the sea and rocks, months previously, identified by Maxim and interred in the family crypt. Yeah, well, about that, says Maxim: actually [MULTIPLE PLOT SPOILERS AHEAD] I lied - the body in the boat will be found to be Rebecca's. But how do you know, dear? Well, because I shot and killed her and then put it there.
The full story of Maxim and Rebecca's marriage then emerges: enraptured by her beauty and charisma and (I like to imagine) eye-watering sexual proclivities Maxim married her without getting to know her very well, just as he had with the second Mrs de Winter, but unlike the second Mrs de Winter Rebecca turned out to be a borderline psychopath: controlling, violent and pathologically unfaithful to Maxim including having a long-running affair with her own first cousin, Jack Favell.
While Mrs de Winter is still giddy from the revelation that Rebecca is not, in death, a rival for her husband's affections, and that in fact he detested her, it soon becomes clear that there will be an inquest into her death and that Maxim will be required to testify and answer some awkward questions. These don't include having to explain why she was shot, as luckily his bullet passed straight through her without smashing into any bones, but do include having to account for the fact that the boat appeared to have been deliberately scuttled. The inquest eventually reaches a verdict of suicide, but back at Manderley Jack Favell turns up wanting some answers about a note she sent him on the day of her death and a mysterious visit to a London doctor a few days earlier. The de Winters, Favell and one of the officials from the inquest hotfoot it to London (no mean feat in the days before the M5 and M4) to track down the doctor and determine the purpose of her visit. Was she pregnant? If so, who by? And does that make it more or less likely that she subsequently killed herself?
The doctor retrieves his notes and reveals that no, she wasn't pregnant, but instead had some sort of inoperable tumour that probably would have killed her within a year. We are invited to conclude that she then goaded Maxim into killing her by claiming to be pregnant with someone else's child, thus avoiding a lingering and painful demise. Released from the prospect of Maxim getting put away for murder they speed back towards Manderley, learning on the way that Mrs Danvers has done a flit, presumably tipped off by Favell. Maxim has a Bad Feeling and wants to get back to Manderley as soon as possible, driving right through the night to do it, only to arrive back to a dark and moonless night but with an odd crimson glow on the horizon. Yes, you know what they say: red sky at night, Manderley's alight.
Just as with Pride And Prejudice and probably a few other titles on this list, my expressing an opinion is unlikely to change the accumulated weight of critical opinion about Rebecca, so embedded is it in literary culture from its famous first line onwards. As it happens, I enjoyed it greatly, building from its mundane opening May-to-December romance via the various plot revelations to increasing levels of weirdness and borderline hysteria, with the accompanying (but skilfully avoided) risk of ridiculousness. It seems to me as much a novel about the ridiculousness of arbitrary social structures based around class and sex as it is one about manipulation, betrayal and murder, but there is of course no problem with it being both things. Both of the principal protagonists have traits that will irritate modern readers: Maxim is remote, emotionally distant and generally a bit of a pompous and insensitive arse, and the second Mrs de Winter is frustratingly pliant and unassertive, although she does grow a pair somewhat in the second half of the book. Mrs Danvers' motivations remain slightly opaque: while it was evidently narratively OK to strongly imply that Rebecca was a cock-hungry man-eater and that the little seaside cabin she used to use for assignations was regularly liberally festooned with jism, giving anything more than the faintest nod towards the notion that Mrs Danvers loved Rebecca in that way would probably have been unacceptable in the 1930s.
On a similar subject, when the famous Hitchcock adaptation was made in 1940 they were obliged to alter the circumstances of Rebecca's death so that it was accidental (slipping on the wet quay and hitting her head), as the accepted moral code in force at the time for films would not allow a spouse to get away with murder. I have never seen that film, nor, perhaps surprisingly, have I acquired any knowledge of the plot of the second half of the book over the last several decades, so all the various twistiness was pleasingly fresh and surprising to me. Daphne du Maurier's books were a rich source of material for films, notable examples being The Birds and Don't Look Now (both based on short stories).
Lastly, our protagonist is never named during the book (apart from being the second Mrs de Winter, of course) but does let slip on one occasion that people regularly mis-spell her name, so I like to imagine it being Paraphernalia or Emphysema or Chlamydia or something. Other books featured on this blog whose principal protagonists are never given a name include Rogue Male, The Road, Blood Meridian, Surfacing and The Memoirs Of A Survivor.
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