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Olivia Laing on Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca

I am about a month late to this, but Oliver Laing (author of books you should read), wrote about Daphne Du Maurier, and the strangeness of her bestselling novel Rebecca, for The Guardian:  

Rebecca has a disturbingly circular structure, a closed loop like James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake. It ends with Manderley in flames, but the first two chapters are also the conclusion. Husband and wife have been condemned to the hell of expatriation, in a hot, shadowless, unnamed country, staying like criminals in an anonymous hotel. It is apparent that they are revenants in a kind of afterlife, their only pleasure articles from old English magazines about fly fishing and cricket. The narrator attests to their hard-won happiness and freedom, while knowing it resides in a place accessible only by the uncertain routes of dream and memory, expelled from the Eden they never quite possessed.

Du Maurier was under no illusions as to the bleakness of what she had written. “It’s a bit on the gloomy side,” she told her publisher, Victor Gollancz, adding nervously “the ending is a bit brief and a bit grim”. But her predictions of poor sales were inaccurate. Rebecca was a bestseller; 80 years on it still shifts around 4,000 copies a month.

Virago have published a special hardcover edition of Rebecca to celebrate the novel’s 80th anniversary. The cover designed was by Hannah Wood whose artwork was embroidered by specialists Hand & Lock. You can read about the process here.