Although I finished Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca a couple of weeks ago, it's a story that has stayed with me. I would love to pick up another novel by du Maurier, but as I'm trying to catch up on other reading, I had better not let myself get distracted. Instead I've chosen a good middle of the road read, The Rebecca Notebook & Other Memories. It was du Maurier's last published work and gives insight into her writing of the novel. I mentioned that the first draft of the story was discarded and she rewrote it. I would love to have read that first draft, and this book lays out the original plans she had. It also contains other writings on her family and life, and it happens to be a slim book, which should be a quick and interesting read.
Editor Alison Light talks in her introduction about some of the changes du Maurier made to the novel. I really like seeing how the author progresses from a first draft to published novel.
"Typically she wrote the disillusioned epilogue first. Mr. and Mrs. de Winter are introduced as a middle-aged couple of dull English 'expats' living humdrum lives in hotels abroad, a sad pair longing for news of cricket and pining for the English countryside. The final published version made it less parochial, changing the stodgy-sounding 'Henry' to the more glamorous 'Maxim'. Du Maurier also wisely cut those lengthy passages where her narrator snobbishly disparages the nouveaux riches who have turned Manderley into a country club with a golf course and cocktail lounge. The melodramatic ending was dropped and eventually the epilogue became a prologue, tightening the psychological screws, as if the heroine were compulsively retelling the crime-story at the heart of the marriage. 'We can never go back' she says at the beginning of the novel, launching into retrospect."
And no need to worry, as these were some of du Maurier's first intentions which she changed in the finished novel, so I've not given away any spoilers. In this book du Maurier actually shares the notebook entries she made for each chapter of Rebecca describing the action of each scene, which is what I am reading at the moment.
I never really thought about it, but Daphne was born in 1907, which means she grew up during the Edwardian period. Apparently Edwardian girls "envied and adored their male peers", and it was no secret (and biographer Margaret Forster also writes about this) that Daphne would have been happy being born a boy (she referred to herself as the 'boy in the box'). She related better to the men in her family and preferred an adventurous life (learning to sail and fish, wearing trousers and wanting to set off exploring). I think this comes through in her writing. But Light notes that whatever masculine qualities she might have had, Daphne still had "old-fashioned views of men and women and and longed for a settled home life."
I love these sorts of books because they offer a good perspective on the subject plus du Maurier speaks for herself. I'll share one more quote from Light's introduction about du Maurier's writing.
"Why do writers write? What compels them to this strange self-absorbed, self-effacing life? Du Maurier's stories take us into the shuttered places in human psychology where hidden or repressed feelings--jealousy, rage, lust, terror--threaten to overwhelm us, or like love and desire, to transport us into another dimension. Like a medium at a seance, du Maurier felt taken over by writing, possessed by her plot and her characters. That activity, leaving the world, as she calls it, meant losing one's boundaries and yet somehow retaining control. We all fantasise and we all live in our fantasies, imagining we are the authors of our lives, but the novelist makes something lasting and shared of her daydreams. A writer's memoirs or biography will always fascinate us because it offers tantalising glimpses of this mysterious process. Yet however much we learn, the writing life remains a house of secrets. We press our faces to the glass, frustrated and intrigued, seeing only shadows and our own reflection."
Very poetic, especially that last bit, don't you think? She's right, though. Knowing this extra stuff is indeed illuminating in many ways, but we'll never really know the full intentions of a writer. I think that perhaps after this it will have to be du Maurier's autobiography. Between her fiction and short stories I'll be kept busy for some time to come.