It turns Jane Eyre inside out: Rebecca

I guess I needed a break from obscure and demanding Eastern European fiction and have picked up Daphne du Maurier's 1938 novel, Rebecca, the novel that, whether she liked it or not, defined her as a writer (and made a pretty good movie, too, if my memory serves). It really couldn't be more unlike the postmodern, playful, complex novels of Kundera et al. - it's a straightforward, first-person narrative, character- and plot-driven. That said, it's not a throwaway romance, either. DD is well versed in the English literary tradition, and compared with most novels of its genre it's particularly well written, in fact maybe too well written. DD does not miss a chance for lyrical description, which tends to slow the pace, at least if you're going to read this as if you were reading Proust. It's not Proust, and you can skim along at times when the going gets soggy. She's also aware that she's part of a literary tradition of the stranger comes to the English manor house variety; in fact, she seems to invert the plot of the classic Jane Eyre: in this case, reader she marries him (or at least she's engaged to him; haven't reached the marriage yet) in the first 50 pages and the story unfolds as she arrives at the von Winter manor, Manderley (the novel opens w/ her looking back at a Manderley in ruins, noting it's a place she can visit only in memory). In brief, the narrator (unnamed?) is a paid companion for an elderly (and nasty) lady of means; in Monte Carlo she meets Maxim von Winter, recently widowed owned or Manderley. He's in deep mourning (apparently) for his late wife, the eponymous Rebecca - and the title of the novel lets us know that perhaps she's not dead and will appear in person (the lady in the attic as in Jane Eyre?) or as a ghost (turn of the screw?). In any event, after about 2 weeks together of driving around the countryside, Maxim proposes in a domineering and awkward manner, and the narrator - orphaned, w/ few opportunities in life, and seeming to be in love w/ him - acquiesces. Of course he's at least twice he age (she's 21 I think), and they have hardly met and had no physical contact, and she's of a completely different social strata w/ no particular education or worldly experience - how will this work out? We have to suspect he has another motive in proposing this obviously doomed marriage, but what?

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