The Inimitable Original 
 Last night I dreamed I went to Manderley again. 
 I must have read Rebecca before, but can't be sure. Still, something of the writing must have stuck. Reading the opening of the forthcoming book Alena, Rachel Pastan's homage to du Maurier, I felt such a sense of deja vu in the opening pages as to make me almost dizzy, and knew that I first had to check the original at its source. I am glad I did so--and that I chose this Kindle edition, not least for its wonderful concluding essay by Sally Beauman, who puts the novel into a much more radical feminist perspective than the cloak of gothic romance in which du Maurier chose to drape it. (Beauman also wrote her own prequel to the novel in 
 Rebecca's Tale 
 events at Manderley as narrated by the first Mrs. Maxim de Winter.) 
 Last night I dreamed... 
 My memories had faded into a collage of moods and moments, perhaps from the book itself, perhaps from the several screen versions. Yet one of du Maurier's skills is that, even for first-time readers, the story triggers deep memories. It is both romantic and archetypal. The parallels with Jane Eyre are obvious--the great estate, the humble heroine, the aloof master, the shadow of a former marriage--but Charlotte Bronte was tapping into archetypes also: Cinderella and Bluebeard, to name but two, as the Beauman essay points out. One of my surprises in reading the book again now was to find how much time its nameless narrator spends dreaming or daydreaming. Feeling out of place as the modest new bride in historic Manderley, she imagines the servants or neighbors talking about her in disparaging terms. Even when looking forward to something as vague as her future life as chatelaine or as specific as an upcoming costume ball, she plays through little scenes in her mind, imagining how people will greet her and what she will graciously reply. And with almost every step she takes, she imagines her beautiful predecessor Rebecca, the real Mrs. de Winter, playing that role before her, with far greater charm and elegance than she can hope to muster. 
 ...I went to Manderley again. 
 "...I went to Manderley again." That "again" is important. For Rebecca is written in unexpected tenses and from an unusual perspective. The entire book takes place in memory; it is a still-young woman looking back at a past when she was dreaming of a future that she now knows she never will have, having been sabotaged by something even further in the past; there is almost no graspable present there at all. It is also a mystery story, but again a highly unusual one. Within a few pages, we already know the essential outcome. The one major denouement comes not at the end, but two-thirds of the way through the book--and it will indeed be a denouement for those who know the story only from the considerably less shocking Hitchcock movie, constrained by the production codes of its time. So far from being the patient elucidation of a crime, the tension in the latter part of the book comes from how and if a known criminal can escape justice. 
 ...I dreamed I went... 
 Who, finally, is that "I"? Uniquely, she has no name. She is not merely an anonymous narrator, but a nameless heroine also. It is a daring stroke. Does it permit every reader (or at least every woman reader) to cast herself in her place? Perhaps, but we also look beyond her edges at things that she, as a naive narrator though not an unreliable one, does not see. And do we want to identify with a woman so subservient that all her happiness is bound up in pleasing her husband? Sally Beauman thinks not, and believes that the woman we really take away from these pages is the brilliant but never-seen Rebecca. Personally, I did not find it so. I was as seduced as anyone into wanting this Cinderella story to work out, But Beauman makes a powerful case that this woman--whose only identity, as Mrs. de Winter, is borrowed from her husband--is as much his tragic victim as his bride. For a popular romance, this leaves a lot to think about.