'Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again." Sally Beauman begins Rebecca's Tale with the famous opening line of the narrator of Daphne du Maurier's 1938 novel, Rebecca, cleverly awakening memories of the pleasure these words, and the story that they introduce, have given to generations of readers.
Rebecca's Tale is intended as a companion to the original Rebecca, and, like its famous predecessor, conforms to the conventions of romantic fiction - up to a point. Beauman's novel, as is only befitting in this day and age, is also intended as a farewell to the passive heroine, who takes her identity from the men around her, and ends the novel happily married to Mister Right.
Rebecca was Daphne du Maurier's fifth novel. It went through 28 editions in the first four years, and has never been out of print. When it was filmed by Alfred Hitchcock in 1941, Hitchcock rightly emphasised the importance of the house, Manderley, which dominates the novel, and is often remembered more fondly than Maxim de Winter and his two wives - Rebecca, and the novel's nameless narrator, his second wife.
Rebecca's plot hinges on secrets, doubts and things unsaid. It is a moody page-turner in the best tradition of popular fiction. The young, inexperienced second wife, returns to her husband's imposing, ancestral home, where she lives in the shadow of his glamorous first wife, Rebecca, who drowned in a boating accident. She imagines the beautiful Rebecca as the perfect wife, hostess, and sexual partner, feeling ever more inadequate by comparison. Only when the wreck of Rebecca's yacht is washed up by a storm does Maxim reveal the truth: he murdered Rebecca, who taunted him with her promiscuity, his motive being that she was pregnant by another man, and intended to raise the child as heir to Manderley.
Nowadays, rather than identifying with the mousey narrator, who declares her loyal support for her wronged husband, and sticks dutifully by his side, readers tend to cheer for Rebecca, who rebels against her role as a chattel, and is strong enough to break the rules of polite society, even to the ultimate transgression: threatening the system of primogeniture.
Beauman's novel is set in 1951, 20 years after the events of the original. Narration is shared in turn by four voices - the elderly Colonel Julyan, Maxim's crony, who knew both wives; Terence Grey, a librarian who turns out to have good reasons for his obsessive interest in Rebecca; Rebecca herself, in a journal written shortly before her death; and the colonel's unmarried 31-year-old daughter, Ellie. It is extremely well done, convincing in period detail, intelligently constructed, and full of surprises. Each voice rings true, especially that of Rebecca herself, who adds to the uncertainty by being a compulsive liar.
Beauman understands the value of ambivalence, and leaves certain riddles unsolved.
After her father's death, instead of marrying her suitor, and exchanging her role as dutiful daughter for a role as wife and mother, Ellie takes off for Cambridge to take her long-postponed degree. While wishing her well, and thoroughly approving of the independent gesture, the reader cannot help feeling cheated.
Beauman is effectively an intellectual masquerading as a romantic novelist, and it is her intellect and her ideology which both make and mar her project. Daphne du Maurier was a totally instinctive writer, poorly educated, tormented by the conflict between the demands of motherhood and domesticity, both of which she handled ineptly, and the demands of her own creativity.
In spite of all the splendours of her house, on which Manderley was based, she wrote in a hut in the garden. She referred to her creative side as "the boy-in-the-box" - an unfeminine trait, to be indulged furtively. (She used the same boy-in-the-box image to refer to her lesbian tendencies.)
Having grown up in a mildly unconventional theatrical family, she married a thoroughly conventional career soldier, and deeply resented the social demands that his status imposed on her life. It is these hidden tensions, originating in the author's subconscious, that accidentally make Rebecca an exciting and subversive read.
Beauman has dealt very well with the practical challenges of creating a successor to du Maurier's little masterpiece, but a feminist agenda is no substitute for the mysterious power and resonance of the original.
Alannah Hopkin is a writer and critic