Famous opening words of a novel
which although it is not great literature, has a resonance for me and I’m sure
for others who write romance.
Daphne Due Maurier’s Rebecca
has a haunting theme... the death of a beautiful woman and her influence on the
lives of those who come after her. The narrator
of the novel is the second wife, of Maxim De Winter an English gentleman. A
quiet shy rather plain girl of modest background, who marries him when she
meets him abroad and finds that she is in competition with his first wife, the
beautiful voluptuous and mysterious Rebecca.
She doesn’t fit in to his country home, Manderley and she feels that
everyone there remembers the first wife and that she cannot compare favourably
to this beautiful and dead woman. She
becomes unsure of her husband’s love
Du Maurier used the device of
having her narrate the story but not giving her a first name, in order to emphasise
how shy and unconfident and shadowy her heroine felt and how she changed later
in the book.
Rebecca is a romance which
begins with a wedding, so that the heroine an hero are married very early in
the story, rather than working their way towards love, understanding and
marriage. They marry and then the heroine finds that she and her husband don
seem to understand each other and she begins to doubt herself and him. She is hurt by what seems like his
indifference. He begins to question her
love when she is too shy and unsure to reach out to him.
After a terrible misunderstanding
which drives the young Mrs De Winter into despair, the mystery is finally solved. She learns how her predecessor died and she realises
that her husband never loved his first wife. As a writer, I am intrigued by the
nature of the misunderstanding and the way that the climax plays out, with the heroine
assuming a much more dominant role when she learns about the truth of her husbands’
first marriage
