The Road to Manderley

Yesterday I went to

Manderley again. It was when I saw a newspaper piece on Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca — a new edition is out to mark 80 years since its publication. The tagline described it as ‘the original psychological thriller’. I paused. See, I read Rebecca once. I was 19, a bright-eyed literature student, and in the throes of my first real love. I did not realise it was a psychological thriller. To my young mind, addled by oxytocin and cheap red wine, it was a raw and incisive expose of the female psyche.

It’s about a young woman, a new wife to the widower Maxim de Winter. She moves into his home where he lived with his first wife, Rebecca, a figure our heroine becomes increasingly fixated on, until she is certain that Maxim is still in love with Rebecca.

I profoundly identified with the protagonist. I had a Rebecca of my own: my new boyfriend’s ex. They had dated all the way through school, and I tortured myself trawling through her Facebook photos; I wonder how much madder du Maurier’s woman would have made herself if she’d had a whole archive of material rather than just a couple of portraits.

I’m sure the boyfriend didn’t even know I’d retained his ex’s name, but it haunted me.

“Rebecca, always Rebecca. I should never be rid of Rebecca” — babe, same.

I, too, convinced myself of the ex’s beauty, talent, brilliance, and my own failure to compete.

I remember the elation when Maxim said, “You thought I loved Rebecca? I hated her, I tell you”. I’m mortified now, but how I longed to hear that then.

Rebecca has never gone out of print. It could be its obvious literary merit and important contribution to the Gothic genre; but I wonder if it’s down to basic bitches driven mad by obsessive online ex-stalking. One girl’s self-help manual is any man’s psychological horror story.