Niche Book Club
Rebecca
By Daphne du Maurier
Join us on Tuesday, May 7 at 6:30 pm for our latest installment of Niche Book Club: Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier.
Book Description from the British Library: Rebecca is the most famous of Daphne du Maurier’s novels. Published in 1938, it has never gone out of print and is one of the great international bestsellers. Having destroyed her first attempt at the novel, du Maurier returned to writing it whilst in Egypt, where she and her soldier husband were stationed in Alexandria. Despite being composed in this alien situation, Rebecca is widely regarded as the Cornish novel, and is evidently the product of du Maurier’s acute homesickness and discomfort in her role as dutiful army wife. The novel’s iconic opening line – ‘Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again’ – was, in part, born out of du Maurier’s own romantic preoccupation with ‘Menabilly’, a Cornish house she stumbled across and trespassed in her youth. There are autobiographical strains too, in her characterisation of the two antagonistically bound women at the centre of the novel: the first Mrs de Winter, Rebecca, and the nameless second Mrs de Winter, the novel’s narrator. Du Maurier felt herself caught between being a dutiful, conventional wife and an independently minded creative. This irresolvable tension is explored in her ambivalent depiction of Rebecca and the narrator as strangely allied opposites. https://www.bl.uk/works/rebecca
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