![]() ![]() He swiftly rescues her from drudgery, proposes marriage, and takes her back to England to live in his beautiful and ancient estate, Manderley. In Monte Carlo, our narrator meets Maxim de Winter, a tall, dark and handsome aristocrat, recently widowed. She is exceedingly young - shy, inexperienced, and under the thumb of a wealthy lady who has employed her as a travel companion. She is quite simply, not Rebecca - her husband’s late first wife. It is the novel’s unnamed narrator who speaks that first line - the second Mrs de Winter, a woman perpetually in her predecessor’s shadow. Newly discovered Du Maurier poems shed light on a talented writer honing her craft This is the strange paradox of Du Maurier’s novel: its characters are doomed to refer (and defer) endlessly to Rebecca, who “always” did things, perfectly and elegantly, a certain way, while Rebecca herself never appears. “Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again,” the book begins - though it is not Rebecca who speaks. Its opening line perfectly encapsulates the narrative’s core theme. ![]() Rebecca by Daphne Du Maurier (1938), belongs to this elite collection. A small group of novels are famous for their first lines: Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice (1813), Herman Melville’s Moby Dick (1851) and Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina (1877). ![]()
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