Rebecca by Daphne Du Maurier (Epub)

Description

With these words, the reader is ushered into an isolated gray stone mansion on the windswept Cornish coast, as the second Mrs. Maxim de Winter recalls the chilling events that transpired as she began her new life as the young bride of a husband she barely knew. For in every corner of every room were phantoms of a time dead but not forgotten—a past devotedly preserved by the sinister housekeeper, Mrs. Danvers: a suite immaculate and untouched, clothing laid out and ready to be worn, but not by any of the great house’s current occupants. With an eerie presentiment of evil tightening her heart, the second Mrs. de Winter walked in the shadow of her mysterious predecessor, determined to uncover the darkest secrets and shattering truths about Maxim’s first wife—the late and hauntingly beautiful Rebecca.

This special edition of Rebecca includes excerpts from Daphne du Maurier’s The Rebecca Notebook and Other Memories, an essay on the real Manderley, du Maurier’s original epilogue to the book, and more.

User’s Reviews

Review “Du Maurier is in a class by herself.” — New York Times From the Back Cover “Last night I dreamt I went to Manderly again.”With these words, the reader is ushered into an isolated gray stone mansion on the windswept Cornish coast, as the second Mrs. Maxim de Winter recalls the chilling events that transpired as she began her new life as the young bride of a husband she barely knew. For in every corner of every room were phantoms of a time dead but not forgotten—a past devotedly preserved by the sinister housekeeper, Mrs. Danvers: a suite immaculate and untouched, clothing laid out and ready to be worn, but not by any of the great house’s current occupants. With an eerie presentiment of evil tightening her heart, the second Mrs. de Winter walked in the shadow of her mysterious predecessor, determined to uncover the darkest secrets and shattering truths about Maxim’s first wife—the late and hauntingly beautiful Rebecca.This special edition of Rebecca includes excerpts from Daphne du Maurier’s The Rebecca Notebook and Other Memories, an essay on the real Manderley, du Maurier’s original epilogue to the book, and more.

Reviews from Amazon users, collected at the time the book is getting published on UniedVRG. It can be related to shiping or paper quality instead of the book content:

⭐ No spoilers here… I loved the book, but I wanted to write a review to give this recommendation to new readers: The first two chapters are written from the ‘present’ which sends the rest of the book into a flashback of the past. Which is fine, but after reading, I wished I saved those two chapters until the end — for these 4 reasons:(1) It takes away a lot of the suspense because you will know a few things about what happens in the end. Big shocks are watered down in what is supposed to be a suspenseful book.(2) It takes a lot longer to get into the book. I started to read and put down a few times, and it took a few months to get passed the first two chapters because it was all descriptions of a place I didn’t care about (yet).(3) The book ends rather abruptly and it needs an epilogue. Myself, I went back to re-read the first two chapters for a sense of finality — and then they meant something to me as a reader because I did care.(4) Because it needs an epilogue, the publisher of the paperback provides an old, draft version of one in the back. Not realizing that this was never part of the book, I read it with confusion. A character’s name was different, plot points were different, the implied future was in conflict with the ending I had just read, and large chunks of text were the exact same as in the first two chapters (as they were originally meant to be that missing epilogue after all). After reading this draft, I wondered why they moved the final epilogue to the beginning in the first place. And why give us a conflicting and confusing draft? …So, hope this helps if you are eager to read this classic. Skip ahead to chapter 3 (or the last paragraph at the end of chapter 2) and save the rest for a much-needed epilogue after an abrupt ending.

⭐ The Kindle version of this book is heavily abridged and about half the length of the original. There is nothing on the page that indicates that this edition is not the full version. Once you read the book it becomes obvious that it’s heavily edited to use simplified language, which may be good for English language learners, but bad for anyone who wants to enjoy the details and nuances of this story. Deceptive marketing.

⭐ I had known I wanted to read this book for awhile so was excited at the price. I bought it and was surprised at in being only 130 pages. Read it and enjoyed it quite a bit but realized I never even read those first iconic words. Come to realize this is an abridged version. No point in buying and rereading the full story when I know everything that happens. It’s hard for me to come by books I truly enjoy and this just ruined my reading experience and now after only a few days I need to find a new book.

⭐ Wow! What a writer of romantic and mystery fiction was Dame Daphne Du Maurier! Born in London in 1907 to a famous actor and granddaughter of a noted illustrator she won fame for her excellent works of fiction. Rebecca was written in the 1930’s and won an Oscar for its 1940 film adaptation starring Joan Fontaine, Laurence Olivier and Judith Anderson was directed by Alfred Hitchcock in his first American produced film. The story is classic. Maxim De Winter is the widower of a beautiful and mysterious woman named Rebecca. Maxim weds the mousy unnamed woman who is the narrator of the novel and sweeps her away to his beautiful estate in Cornwall named Manderley. There she meets the weird housekeeper Mrs Danvers who loved Rebecca. The story is told with poetry in the pen of the author. Her evocation of the flora, fauna, seasons and sea around lush Manderley is beautiful. The novel is filled with surprises as we readers learn all the dark secrets of the deceased Rebecca. Exciting court room drama and suspense are hallmarks of this work. The major themes are jealousy and the evanescent nature of time. I have read this novel several times and always enjoy it. A great novel!

⭐ I’ve saved this book on my to-read list for so long. It’s one of the “secret treat” books I’ve stocked up like emergency supplies for desperate moments, when I need something new to me but 100% guaranteed lovely. After a lot of recent travel, stress, and child minding, I finally found a few hours of respite in a warm lamplit room, deliciously alone. Rebecca was indeed exactly what I needed.All this aside, the book isn’t for everyone. If you’re not already a fan, this checklist may help you decide whether or not to add Rebecca to your own secret treat shelf:1. Do you like gothic fiction?Although it was first published in 1938, Rebecca ages exquisitely and i’s not hard for a modern reader to fall deeply in love with it. The style and turns of phrase are no barrier–it’s the genre itself that will either draw you in or leave you cold. I loved Jane Eyre as a child, and this love abetted my love of Rebecca, which is famously derivative of Jane Eyre’s general plot: woman falls in love with a man haunted in mysterious ways by his former wife. If the idea of women wandering windswept grounds of great houses, plagued by mysterious barriers to love, sometimes in the form of the ghost (literal or figurative) of another woman sounds cozy to you, if you loved Catherine and Heathcliff or Darcy and Elizabeth, and you fancy dark psychological acrobatics, give Rebecca a shot.2. Does a warm bath, a hot drink, and a new sweater sound good to you right now?Rebecca is a fall read, hands down. It’s rainy, it’s morose, it’s the dominating presence of a grand old mansion in a remote location.3. Have you seen the movie Rebecca (1940), did you like it, do you like old movies at all?The movie does not follow the plot exactly, but having loved the movie for a long time and now having read the book, the tone of the movie feels authentic and true to the novel. Once every few years, I go on an autumn binge and watch The Uninvited (1944), Vertigo (1958), Rebecca, and to end on a lighter note, The Ghost and Mrs. Muir (1947).4. Are you a feminist?Old fashioned gender roles in Rebecca’s setting will definitely irk some readers. As a feminist, I was less annoyed than interested. The mirroring of the protagonist (shy, inexperienced, subservient) and the dead Rebecca (domineering, brave, selfish, accomplished) added a great sociological layer to the experience of reading. Sally Beauman’s excellent Afterword offers a wonderful explanation of the gendered forces at work in Rebecca, and also addresses several misinterpretations of the novel at the time of its publication.If you’ve answered yes to any of the questions above, I absolutely recommend that you read the first 30 pages at least. Get past the description of Manderly in the dream, and begin to read about when the protagonist first meets widower Maxim de Winter, and if you’re liking it by then, you’ll love the rest.

⭐ When I selected this “Hardcover” book on line, I never expected it to be 4 inches X 7 inches in size (like a small pocket paperback) with 1/16th inch size print that is barely readable with the best of magnifying eye glasses. I’ve already donated it to a school where hopefully some younger eyes will be able to read the minuscule text. This book should’ve come with a warning about it’s size and type size.

⭐ I’ve always been an admirer of the first person narrative. When handled deftly, it magnifies the complex variables that comprise us all. Rebecca is a psychological treatise with a confessional tone spawned from the narrator’s perception, and this is the story. That the narrator is young, inexperienced, and overwhelmed to the point of skittishness sets the dark tone of every paragraph in this cleverly paced mystery. Her vantage point is solidly built on assumption, suspicion and crippling self doubt. The plot is a simple one: the young narrator begins as a paid, personal companion to a domineering wealthy woman, who is on holiday in Monte Carlo, when fate places her in the dining room of a luxuriant hotel next to the table of the troubled widower, Max de Winter, who hails from the Cornish Coast. An awkward and unlikely alliance develops between the narrator and the worldly Max de Winter, which leads to a hasty marriage, in which the reader learns along with the narrator of de Winters’ disturbing past. Set in the house and rambling coastal grounds of de Winters’ stately Manderley, the narrator enters a dynamic firmly in play, whose tone was cast and exists still from the hand of Rebecca: the first Mrs. de Winter. Rebecca’s shadow looms imperiously, and brings to the fore the narrator’s insecurities. Having no background story on her predecessor, the inchoate narrator is tossed by the winds of assumption, half-truths and incomplete perceptions made all the more dark by the presence of Rebecca’s loyal personal maid, Mrs. Danvers, whose presence lends a disquieting air, due to her supercilious knack for comparison. Rebecca is an off-kilter mystery that unfolds along the road of the search for truth regarding what, exactly, happened to Rebecca. That the narrator stays in suspense until the sinister end lures the reader through a story elegantly told in language so poetic, it is its own experience.

⭐ Rebecca is the story of an unnamed young woman who is all alone in the world. She is awkward and shy, believing she is homely and poorly educated.Traveling as the companion of Mrs. Van Hopper, this young woman meets an older man recently widowed—Maxim de Winter. She falls desperately in love with him and agrees to marry him without knowing much about him or what exactly he feels for her.She moves to Manderley, Maxim de Winter’s estate, and learns about his first wife Rebecca who even in death over shadows this young woman. Rebecca is prettier, smarter, more talented. Hell—she even has a first name.The story (told from the new Mrs. du Winter’s first person perspective) takes you through the first months of their marriage as this shy unnamed young woman fights a battle against her new husband’s moods and seeming disinterest, the head housekeeper Mrs. Danvers who is manipulative and sadistic, and the young woman’s jealousy of her first husband’s dead wife—the magnanimous, seemingly perfect Rebecca.It’s drama. It’s brooding. It’s the kind of story that makes you think all the characters are certifiable. It’s a good, quick read if you’re into a modern gothic story full of mystery and suspense.And drama. Did I mention the drama? Cause there’s a lot of it.

⭐ I loved this book…but I am so disappointed to see that I bought and read what must be an abridged version for kindle. It was only 130 pages…when I started googling to get some clarification about the ending, I found out this is a 400 page book! WHAT HAPPENED? Nowhere does it say this is an abridged version. Now I know the “mystery” but have only read part of the book?

⭐ Despite what the description reads, YOU DO NOT GET the edition of the book with the extras. You get an older version. In fact, the printing quality of the book I received was so bad with disproportionate ink, I’m not even sure what I got would have been an enjoyable reading experience. I specifically ordered this for the excerpts and upon receipt, I promptly packed it up and returned it.

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