BOOK REVIEW: Mrs. deWinter

(Note from Wendy:  This review contains spoilers from Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca.)  

If you have not read Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca, Susan Hill’s sequel MRS. deWINTER is going to be of no interest whatsoever. If on the other hand, you found Rebecca to be haunting you might find some value in this sequel by a more modern author.

After their home Manderly burned, and Maxim deWinter had been tried for the death of his first wife Rebecca, he and his second wife escape to Europe. They have made a comfortable life trying to forget the horrors that surrounded Manderly. A death in the family causes them to return to England and they think that they can forget the past and start over. The problem is that beautiful, malevolent, dead Rebecca is still haunting them and means to finally get her revenge.

It had been awhile since I read Rebecca and was concerned that details, names and places for example, would have slipped my mind. Susan Hill does an excellent job of subtly re-introducing the old characters. As in the original, the story is told by the second Mrs. deWinter and again we never learn her name. There is some sense to this because THE Mrs. deWinter will always be Rebecca.

The author captured du Maurier’s style of writing very well. The formal, almost boring, manner in which the story is narrated becomes hypnotizing after a few pages. For example the descriptions of places are long and at times tedious, but they give the reader a feel for the atmosphere, peaceful and serene or vaguely threatening.

The main objection I had to the original was also true with this follow-up. I know that a Gothic novel has to build drama, but at times it was a tad overdone. When Maxim hands his wife a letter on board the ship taking them across the Channel, we read a page and a half of how frightened she is to open it. Her heart seemed to stop; her breathing became labored; her skin became clammy, and her hand shook. The contents of the letter is anti-climatic.

Maybe a law should be passed to keep authors from messing with well-known books. A book with an ambiguous ending stays in our memories longer; to know more details ruins it.

I will be reading Susan Hill again though. I discovered that she was the author of the book, The Woman in Black and I loved the play. I need to know if MRS. deWINTER is representative of her style of writing or if she just did a good job of channeling Daphne du Maurier.