Rebecca
Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again. One of the most famous opening lines in all of fiction. What follows is worthy of it.
Manderley
Daphne du Maurier's 1938 gothic masterpiece is narrated by a shy, unnamed young woman who marries the wealthy, brooding Maxim de Winter and arrives at his great Cornish estate Manderley. There she discovers that the house, the servants, and the very atmosphere are saturated by the presence of his dead first wife Rebecca, who appears to have been everything the narrator is not: beautiful, accomplished, beloved. The sinister housekeeper Mrs. Danvers is devoted to Rebecca's memory and hostile to the narrator's existence. The novel is a gothic exploration of inadequacy, obsession, and the stories the living tell about the dead. Alfred Hitchcock adapted it in 1940 and won the Academy Award for Best Picture.
Reading Rebecca
Atmosphere
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Chapter
"Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again.
"Daphne du Maurier · Rebecca
Du Maurier wrote the novel while living in Egypt with her husband who was stationed there with the military. She was homesick for Cornwall and wrote Manderley as the house she longed for, built entirely from imagination and memory.
Hitchcock's 1940 film was the only film he made that won the Academy Award for Best Picture. Du Maurier was famously dissatisfied with it, feeling that Joan Fontaine was too frail and that the film softened the novel's darkness.