The effect is curiously unstable, not so much a story as a network of possibilities, in which the reader is rapidly entangled. Whole pages go by devoted to her imaginings and speculations. The second Mrs de Winter might not excel at much, but she is among the great dreamers of English literature.
There are two sunken ships, a murder, a fire, a costume party and multiple complex betrayals, and yet it’s startling to realise how much of its drama never actually happens. It’s a melodrama, and by no means short on bangs and crashes. The girl is anxious, observant, dreamy, terribly romantic, a perennial fantasist whose fears and insecurities bloom out of control when she becomes mistress of the haunting Manderley. She wrote it in the first person, from the perspective of a young unnamed narrator, who meets the dashing, yet unhappy Max de Winter while working as a lady’s companion in a grand hotel in Monte Carlo.
Inchingly, Daphne du Maurier’s difficult novel came together.
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