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Dear reader,
It was an absolute joy to sit down and pick apart Daphne du Maurier’s gothic masterpiece, Rebecca. It’s one of the books that you’ve suggested most often and I hope you felt we did it justice.
It’s always a treat sharing a book you love with a friend who has never read it before. And so it was, discussing the twists, turns and unknowable corners of Rebecca with Dominic - who enjoyed it so much, he declared it “richer than an Agatha Christie”. (I’m intrigued by your opinions on that one.)
If you’ve not read Rebecca I really hope (and I will never say this again) you didn’t listen to the second half of the podcast and that you remain spoiler-free.
I also hope you’ll take my advice and pick it up as the perfect end of summer read, ideally opening it to the sound of crashing waves as you’re pulled deeper into the mysteries of Manderley. Once you’ve done that, make sure to listen to the remainder of the episode, then email in and tell us if you saw the ending coming.
Frankly I’m jealous - the whole time I was re-reading Rebecca for this episode, I wished I could have the experience of doing so for the first time. While I still loved it this second time around, noticing much I’d missed before, there’s something about that first time encountering that “Crash! Bang!” that can’t be replicated.
Write in to [email protected] and tell us about the books you wish you could read again for the first time.
Below, we have recommendations, polls and some really brilliant and insightful correspondence from you about last week’s episode on Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls.
Rhiannon has, as usual, put together our Book Club Notes for those who want to delve deeper into the world of Rebecca. If you’ve used our notes with your book club, we’d love to hear about it - even better, send us a picture and we’ll share it in a future newsletter.
Until next time,
If you enjoyed Rebecca
Some more recommendations for your list
📚 Daphne du Maurier by Margaret Forster - Mentioned in the episode, this is often described as the definitive biography of the Rebecca writer. It examines private letters to dig deeper into the complicated life and loves of the author.
📚 Jamaica Inn by Daphne du Maurier - If you loved Rebecca’s dark twists and turns as well as the Cornish backdrop, this should be your next stop.
📚 The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters - If you’re looking for more locked up mansions and chills (Stephen King said “several sleepless nights are guaranteed”), add this to your list.
📚 The Castle of Otranto by Horace Walpole - The place where so many Gothic tropes began. Horror, romance and a looming family home all feature in this 1764 novel,
We need your vote
"Everybody you speak to is an unreliable narrator, no?" said Dominic. But as the pair discussed, not everyone is a fan of a novel featuring a misleading guide. Where do you stand? And do provide examples of the most deceptive narrators you’ve seen in literature.
Click to vote - and remember to leave your name with a comment, so we can share your thoughts in next week's newsletter.
Notes on… Rebecca
Rebecca qualifies as a “classic” and yet is also eminently readable, surely a great meeting point for any book club you might be part of. Enjoy the thrill of opening it for the first time, or pick it up again and find new depth in the mysteries between the lines. However the story comes to you, here are some talking points for a deeper exploration of du Maurier’s Gothic thriller.
“It’s a wonderful mystery story. It's quite surprising, I think,” said Dominic. “If you think it's all a ghost story, you will be mistaken because it turns into something much darker and more intriguing.”
A Gothic thriller, fairytale-esque, “a 1930s whodunit”. Throughout the podcast, the presenters referred to Rebecca as many things - how would you categorise this novel?
“There is tonnes of the Brontës in this book”, said Dominic. From Jane Eyre to Wuthering Heights, what elements of the famous sisters’ stories did you notice? Du Maurier was a voracious reader, did you see traces of inspiration from other books within the pages of Rebecca?
“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 recreating history as she would have wished it to be?” asked Tabby.
The unreliable narrator is central to the enduring fame of Rebecca - what clues does du Maurier offer that this character is not all that she claims to be?
Agatha Christie wrote to du Maurier, wanting to know more about why the narrator is never named. In response, du Maurier later claimed: “I could not think of one, and it became a challenge in technique, the easier because I was writing in the first person.” Why do you think her name is never revealed? How does knowing a narrator’s identity add to or detract from a storyline?
“[Rebecca] hangs over everything,” says Tabby. “She's everywhere. Right from the beginning, we're encouraged to think this is her story. Her name is on the front cover… She’s more domineering, more charismatic, more passionate as a ghost than the corporeal form of our narrator.” Do you agree - does Rebecca succeed in being the most domineering character? What techniques does du Maurier use to ensure she looms large?
Rebecca is “the ultimate fantasy of the demonic woman”, says Dominic, describing the moment when when the truth about her is revealed in the final third. Did you agree with this depiction? In what ways does du Maurier draw the two women as opposites?
“Rebecca is born out of [du Maurier’s] own remarkable psychology,” said Dominic. “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.”
Du Maurier’s own romantic life is often linked to her writing. The author herself brushed off such parallels but repeatedly categorised the book as “a study in jealousy”. How does envy drive the plot? What moments of the storyline convey this emotion powerfully?
The writer Helen Dunmore describes Mrs Danvers as “a skull-faced, sinister figure of nightmare”. There are suggestions that she is in love with Rebecca, or that she has been driven mad by an obsession with her. How did you view Mrs Danvers? And, as the presenters suggested, should we be wary of how she is presented to us by our narrator?
Norman Collins, who edited Rebecca, noted that “Manderley is as much an atmosphere as a tangible erection of stones and mortar.” Describe the way in which Manderley itself is a character in the story. How does the house and its Cornish location, amid the backdrop of those crashing waves, become integral to the telling of the story and the building of tension?
"I want to build up the character of the first [wife] in the mind of the second...until wife 2 is haunted day and night...a tragedy is looming very close and CRASH! BANG! something happens," du Maurier famously wrote when planning her novel.
Were you shocked by the “CRASH! BANG!” and the many twists in the novel’s final third? How does du Maurier’s “embroidered and rich, but so well-controlled” writing and pacing reveal them without erring into melodrama?
Reading between the lines, who really is the villain and what do you think the truth of the story is? Can we ever really know?
The quote that says it all
“Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again.”
The opening lines of du Maurier’s novel remain some of the most famous for a reason, perfectly setting up the claustrophobic, Gothic mystery that has rapt readers for decades. But what quote stayed with you after you finished the book? Email in and let us know.
Who should you give this to?
A friend prone to romantic jealousy? Someone with an escape to Cornwall in the diary? That person in the office who you’re never quite sure is telling the truth…?
Tell us, who would you share this book with?
Recommended reads
We’re taking recommendations here to share with the Book Notes community. Tell us what book fellow members should pick up next by sending two or three sentences about your novel of choice and we’ll feature as many as we can here… Write to [email protected].
Jane says that when she read Elizabeth Strout’s Olive Kitteridge, “I immediately went back to the beginning and reread… Olive is a complex character and not a caricature of a narcissist. Each chapter in the novel could stand alone as a short story.”
Kecia recommends The Correspondent by Virginia Evans. “Whilst the premise (old woman writes lots of letters) may not seem that exciting - this is such a beautiful book... It’s also perfect for book lovers as many authors are featured or mentioned.”
Alex wrote in with books that had changed them and their perspective - two were Half of the Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (“Such wonderful writing and an unexpected ending”) and Whale by Cheon Myeong-Kwan, “a very odd book which I change my mind about often as it can be interpreted is many different ways.”
Reviewers’ corner
We can’t wait to see your responses to Rebecca. Write in to [email protected] with ‘review’ in the subject line and tell us…
How you handled the unreliable narrator.
Your analysis of du Maurier’s twists, turns and that shock ending.
We were eagerly awaiting your opinions on Hemingway, here’s a selection of your commentary…
Your polls
Dominic and Tabby admitted they had, at first, been sceptical of Hemingway because of his literary reputation. We asked you if you had ever done the same - and 54% of you admitted you had avoided books, but later been proved wrong.
Many of you kindly wrote in to say you had been prompted to pick up reads you had previously avoided because of the podcast - although you were divided on whether being pushed out of your bubble was always a good thing (especially, it seems, when it comes to Virginia Woolf).
Like many, Merel said she had been proven both right and wrong in her estimations. “At first I avoided Harry Potter because it was popular (popular books obviously cannot be good, a twelve-year-old me thought) and I was obviously proven wrong,” she said. “I was similarly sceptical about R.F. Kuang's Babel, and sadly I was right.”
Don admitted his folly in not picking up Agatha Christie earlier, saying: “I had the impression her books were too slight to bother with.” Listening to a Rest Is History episode changed his mind and now he has been reading her novels for months. “I was taken in by her record of social conditions in England through the mid-decades of the 20th century. That and her view of evil, which I found to be a good antidote to the excesses of current thought dominating here in the US,” he adds.
“There remains a single exception to my open-minded attitude and I continue to run scared of James Joyce,” Cathy admitted.
When it came to your scoring of For Whom the Bell Tolls, it was a mixed picture, but on the whole it skewed higher, with 8/10 clinching the vote - right in the middle of Dominic and Tabby.
Zeba could only muster 5/10, writing: “I loathe the cod-Spanish, and thought Robert was just such a dull fellow.” Bruce agreed: “I get why the speech patterns were done that way, but I found them to be mannered, annoying and artificial. Also, as Dominic says, we do spend a lot of time in that cave.”
But another commenter completely disagreed. “I found the story telling, the language, especially the thee's and thou's, and the spare descriptive writing completely immersive,” they said. Another countered Dominic’s cave boredom. “There is a great payoff at the end of this book, so that the endless pages of introspection and flashbacks are eventually worth it, because they convincingly convey the deep bonds which are forged between Robert Jordan and a band of mountain guerillas,” they wrote.
Maria and Robert
Aja from Slovenia picked up Hemingway because of the podcast - having avoided the author for years. He wanted to raise “one big quibble”. “I'm talking about the character of Maria,” he says. "A horribly abused girl jumping into bed (‘sleeping robe’, I should say) with an American stranger at the first chance to reawaken his lust for life? A bit convenient for Jordan, isn't it. I appreciate what Hemingway was trying to do by cramming a relationship of a lifetime into three days, making them play house on the frozen bed of pine needles. Still, I found Maria's constant preoccupation with pleasing Jordan (lessons with Pilar?) and Jordan's equally persistent thoughts of her body (on and on with ‘the small firm breasts’) rather unsettling. Or is that just how love looks like in war?”
For Those Whom Found It Tough Going…
Many Hemingway fans wrote in to urge the community to try other novels and versions of his writing. For instance, Deborah suggested “the best place to start reading Hemingway is with his short stories. Hills Like White Elephants depicts a man and a woman talking while waiting for a bus that only one of them is going to take. The subtext, brilliantly portrayed, is whether the woman will get an abortion; the word is never used. Another great story is The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber. Hemingway explores the power dynamics of a marriage through an African safari. His style is most effective in these short pieces.”
Delving into the history
Many of you have already picked up some of Dominic’s recommendations of history books about the Spanish Civil War. Kate emailed to add Our Fathers Fought Franco to the list, “written by the children (and one grandchild) of four working class men who joined the International Brigade and went to Spain.” She adds: “One of them, Archibald Campbell MacAskill (AC for short), was my partner's maternal granddad, and his story was written by my partner's sister Lisa Croft (their mum couldn't write his story unfortunately as she was just starting to develop dementia when the book was being written). The people who wrote it aren't 'writers' as such, so it isn't literary in that sense, and obviously it is very partisan as the people who wrote it are very proud of what their fathers did, but I really enjoyed reading it as a tale of the lives of four men both before and after the war, including discussions about their relationships with the Communist party (not all of them were the same!) and their treatment by the government after the war.”
Additionally, Lenore from Boston recommended the historical novel trilogy by Spanish author José María Gironella: “It covers the conflict before, during and after through the experiences of one Spanish family. A great read.”
The unlikely legal connection
Carolyn, a librarian from London, wrote in with a fascinating tidbit about For Whom the Bell Tolls. “I was honoured to work for a while at the library of the Honourable Society of Lincoln's Inn, and one of my favourite pieces of lore (the Inns of Court have a LOT of lore!) was that the bell Donne is referring to in his poem is the bell of the Lincoln's Inn chapel where he was once a preacher. The bell still tolls, for services and to mark the death of a Bencher. And it never failed to give me chills, as Tabby would say.”
‘A literary reawakening’
“I grew up on NZ dairy farms,” wrote Greg. “Our language was simple. I loved reading but gave it away because I felt nothing spoke to me about my life once I reached late teens. NZ rural life is austere to say the least. My friend in Dunedin gave me a book of [Hemingway’s] short stories and I was all over it. It was a renaissance. Of sorts. Then I read everything else of his at once. And other stuff. A literary reawakening because of Hem.”
Not so highly recommended
Finally, we always want to know who you’d recommend the books we cover to - usually just for fun. So thanks to Diana who simply says that when it comes to For Whom the Bell Tolls… “No one, really. My macho ex-husband loved Hemingway. Probably spoiled it for me.”
Scoreboard
Book | Dominic’s Verdict | Tabby’s Verdict |
|---|---|---|
Rebecca | 9/10 | 9/10 |
For Whom the Bell Tolls | 7/10 | 9/10 |
Brave New World | 5/10 | 6/10 |
The Thirty-Nine Steps | 7/10 | 7/10 |
Circe | 9/10 | 10/10 |
Next on The Book Club
Here’s what’s coming up in the podcast over the next few weeks…
September 1: Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
September 8: Lord of the Flies by William Golding
September 15: A Month in the Country by J. L. Carr
September 22: American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis
September 29: Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë
October 6: Goldfinger by Ian Fleming
October 13: The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath
Keeping score
This week, both Tabby and Dominic gave Rebecca nine creepily, sexually infatuated housekeepers out of 10 💀 . But what do you think?
See you next week for Lolita.
The Book Club Team
