Wait! Before you read this one, read the post on Jane Eyre. They go together. Or don’t, you’ll probably be fine without reading that one, but I do mention it. Also, spoiler alert for a 70-year-old book.

Daphne Du Maurier wrote a lot of things, and I’ve only read two of them. After I read Rebecca I found out she wrote The Birds, which I read for school ages and ages ago and never connected to her. It’s a great short story, scarier than the Hitchcock movie, and you should go read it. Du Maurier is good at suspense and creepiness.

You should also read Rebecca. But don’t go in expecting too many chills and thrills. It’s considered a gothic horror–it’s number 10 on my gothic horror list–but it’s not horrific, it’s not much of a romance, and it’s only sort of gothic. It’s more of a psychological deep dive set against a gothic background. As the narrator feels lost in her new husband’s grand estate, we start to feel lost in the wilds of the narrator’s own mind.

Jane Eyre had to balance her passionate nature with society’s demands, but in Rebecca there is no balance to be found. In Rebecca, society will eventually destroy you no matter what.

First we have the narrator, a young orphan swept up in a whirlwind romance with a rich and brooding older man and plunked down in Manderley, his country estate. We never learn the narrator’s name. Her name hardly matters, her personality hardly matters. She hardly matters to herself–all she thinks about is her husband Max de Winter, who she quietly worships, and his dead first wife Rebecca, her opposite in every way. Rebecca’s name matters. Rebecca’s personality matters. Rebecca, in many ways, is the only one who matters. Everybody loved Rebecca (especially the head housekeeper, Mrs. Danvers), she was so charming and bold and free. Except for the people who hated her, she was so cruel and demanding.

Our narrator spends much of her time at Manderly feeling insecure and intimidated by the memory of Rebecca, still alive and well in the house. She feels disconnected from Max and totally out of place with his upper class social network. Mrs. Danvers, fiercely devoted to Rebecca’s memory, actively hates serving this new wife. This is the gothic novel upside down–the narrator has gotten her happy ending and it sucks. How could she ever have thought this was true love? So naive to think marrying de Winter would transform her into a princess or solve all her problems.

Eventually our narrator finds out de Winter hated Rebecca and her wild ways (which aren’t completely spelled out but involve a lot of affairs). He actually shot her in a moment of rage, then staged a boating accident to cover up his crime. A year or so later he married our narrator precisely because she was the plain, wilting, childlike opposite of Rebecca, and the narrator shrinks herself as small as possible to fit that role for him. He probably doesn’t love her. There’s probably not enough person there to love, but he approves and accepts her. Our narrator decides this is enough, that he’s not pining for Rebecca, and devotes herself entirely to his defense. It’s sad and a bit sickening, but the narrator is resigned, even content with this.

I read up on du Maurier a bit, and a lot of people consider both Rebecca and the narrator to be two halves of du Maurier’s own personality. On the one hand she was a bisexual bohemian novelist who grew up among theater folk, very free and wild for her era. On the other hand, she married a traditional military man and devoted herself to him and their children. Perhaps this book was a deep dive into her own psychological dilemma–be Rebecca and give up status, love, family, or be the narrator and possibly lose her own identity to her husband. Du Maurier found a balance between both, as Jane Eyre did, but if Rebecca is any clue it was a balance hard to keep.

But I realize I’ve gone a bit abstract in my review. It can’t be helped, really, because there’s very little concrete plot to this book. It’s a stripped down gothic standard–orphan marries rich man, moves to beautiful country estate full of mystery, mystery is finally revealed and almost ruins everything. Max’s beautiful house is burned down but he and his bride live something-ly ever after. Almost all the tension is in the narrator’s head and heart. But that tension is well explored and deeply developed.

The novel is richly written and layered with symbolism, a haunting and lonely atmosphere, and deep psychology. The narrator has little of her own personality or passion, but she’s a deep observer of others’ personalities and as she observes even the villainous Mrs. Danvers becomes a complex person full of pain, one who might even deserve our pity. If you’re looking for adventure or horror you won’t find much here. If you want to immerse yourself in the world of Manderley and its people, to feel chilled by the wind off the sea and smell the azaleas outside your window and feel like a bird, whether free as Rebecca or housed in a gilded cage like our narrator, look no further.

This is truly an overlooked classic–I would much rather have read this in school than Henry James–but not that gothic and I definitely wouldn’t consider it a horror novel. For a lit class I’d highly recommend it, but for my project I give it three haunts.