Rebecca: Virago Modern Classics

From the exclusive beaches of Monte Carlo to the verdant grounds of Maxim de Winter’s stately home Manderley, Daphne du Maurier’s gothic classic transports the reader into a social and psychological world of creeping menace and dark desires. Rebecca endures as du Maurier’s masterpiece and Mrs Danvers, the superbly sinister housekeeper, stands as a fictional icon. Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again... With these words a reader is swept up into a world of secrets and lies; one of the most passionate, psychologically twisting and complex stories of all-time. Working as a lady's companion, the orphaned heroine of Rebecca learns her place. Life begins to look very bleak until, on a trip to the South of France, she meets Maxim de Winter, a handsome widower whose sudden proposal of marriage takes her by surprise. Whisked from glamorous Monte Carlo to his brooding estate, Manderley, on the Cornish Coast, the new Mrs de Winter finds Max a changed man. And the memory of his dead wife Rebecca is forever kept alive by the forbidding Mrs Danvers . . . Not since Jane Eyre has a heroine faced such difficulty with the 'Other Woman'. An international bestseller that has never gone out of print, Rebecca is the haunting story of a young girl consumed by love and the struggle to find her identity. You always feel that we’re on the verge of a Daphne du Maurier renaissance. Known of course for Rebecca and Jamaica Inn – largely regarded, and sometimes overlooked, as ‘classics’- du Maurier was far more a properly contemporary novelist, equipped with a tremendously dark imagination: this was, after all, the writer who penned the terrifying short tale Don’t Look Now.