I had only heard praise for this book, but I still went into it without too many expectations. I haven’t yet found too many classics that I’d consider favourites (except The Picture of Dorian Gray and Shirley Jackson’s short fiction), so I wasn’t expecting to like Rebecca nearly as much as I did!

The main reason this book surprised me was the characters. Rarely do I finish a book and feel like I truly know the main characters as people, but du Maurier did an exceptional job here conveying these character’s inner lives to the reader. Even for characters other than the narrator whose thoughts and feelings we don’t have direct access to, their expressions, words and actions paint a vivid picture of their inner turmoil, their main conflicts and their personality.

The titular character, Rebecca, is dead, and yet I could write entire paragraphs about her: her life, her strong character, her relationship with the other characters in the book. She is the overwhelming, looming presence that haunts everyone throughout the story, and even though we only know her through the words and reactions of those who knew her in life, we feel her in every page, in every word and event of the story. The effect that this creates is powerful and masterfully done.

And then we have the MC. She is too young and naive to understand what’s going on around her (and maybe also autistic, which I’ll probably end up writing a forum post about), but even though we see the world through her very skewed vision and understanding of things, we still see everything she does not see: who is trying to take advantage of her, who hurts her because they are stuck in their own grief, the events that are reveals for the MC but not for us, etc. I loved how well du Maurier pulled this off and I really admire when a writer can show and not tell in the way that she does it in this book.

And that brings me to the other thing that surprised me about this novel. There is a mystery at the heart of it: who was Rebecca? And why is everyone that knew her stuck, unable to move on from their grief? We know that there are things about the past that the characters around the MC are withholding, but we don’t really know what or why. The reveals come slowly, they are hinted at with plenty of time and clarity for the reader to see where the story is going. And that is what I found unique about this book: the reveals are not really for the reader, because the reader knows (more or less) what’s going to happen next throughout the book, but the MC doesn’t.

There are no plot twists in this book that will have you going “what???”; even if something surprises you, it will be more of a “oh, I see, that makes sense” type of feeling. The reveals, really, are for the MC and her character growth. The things she realises throughout the book push her to change, some of them shake her worldview completely, and by the end of the story she is not the same she was when it all started. Or, rather, I should say that she is still very much the same in that she is still herself—she has plenty of blindspots, she is younger and more immature than she thinks, and a people-pleaser at heart. But there has been a shift in how she understands herself, those around her, and her place in the world. Whether we, as readers, think she is right in her reinterpretation is still up to us: du Maurier continues to simply show us what is happening, rather than telling us how to feel.

The last thing I’ll mention is that I also loved how strong the sense of place is in this novel. Manderley and the nature that surrounds it are a presence almost as strong as Rebecca’s: a force and a life outside of the other characters’ control and wishes, just like Rebecca. The use of weather is also wonderful: it adds to the mood and the atmosphere of every scene without feeling too dramatic.

I could go on and on about this book. It reminds me of one of my recent reads that also dealt heavily with grief, Monstrilio by Gerardo Sámano Córdoba, in that there are so many things to talk about and analyse. Although I would say the themes in Rebecca are a bit different: this isn’t so much a book about grief (although there is a lot of that, too, especially in the character of Mrs Danvers) but rather a book about time: how we can never erase the past or run away from it, and how each person is constrained in their understanding of the world by the place they occupy in time (their age and experience).

In conclusion, if you like gothic literature with an oppressive atmosphere, unlikeable characters, slow-paced beautiful writing and a strong sense of place, I highly recommend giving this one a go!