The only name she is given is her husband’s, typical of the patriarchal society she lived in. We learn that our narrator has a “lovely and unusual name” but the reader is never privy to it. This is compounded by the fact that de Winter’s new wife, a girl nearly half his age and the narrator of the story, is unnamed for the novel’s entirety. Giving her name to the entire book, we realise early on that names and identity are important in this story and that Rebecca (Max de Winter’s late wife) is going to take centre stage. And of course, there’s the Other Woman – Rebecca. It has the older, wealthy (slightly Byronic) gentleman, and a young, naïve wife, a malevolent housekeeper, along with a quintessential English country house. Marketed at the time as a gothic romance, there’s so much in Rebecca that resonates in other texts. The feeling of familiarity continued when I began reading, even when I found myself in unfamiliar territory with regards to the plot. Without having read it, I was aware of its well-known opening line, “Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again” and I knew the Hitchcock film version. It was one of those books I’d put off reading because I thought I already knew too much of the story.
This was prompted by a recent reading of Daphne du Maurier’s masterpiece, Rebecca. But what I want to consider this month are the characters who are overlooked or forgotten within their texts, marginalised by the writer or the world they depict. The intention of this column has always been to recall the lost or forgotten voices of horror, to remember those writers who, for whatever reason, have become forgotten or overlooked with the passing of time.
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