Rebecca

⚖The case for it

The first line and the dream of driving back to Manderley are what readers carry for decades. The house is the achievement, rendered thickly enough that reviewers rank it “one of the best settings of all time,” with “evil that seems to be lurking at Manderley” from the moment she arrives. Mrs Danvers keeps a dead woman’s rooms as a shrine and is the most alive person in the book. The narrator’s terror of being found out reads as an honest portrait of a young bride out of her depth, since “her lack of qualifications haunts her.” Frank Crawley is the one decent person on the grounds. “Gothic romance with your cup of Earl Grey.”

— the honest librarian

✕The case against

The narrator never grows a spine: “a wimp, weak and ineffectual,” flinching and apologising through chapter after chapter of interior monologue readers call “monotonous and meandering,” worst in the Monte Carlo stretch before Manderley. Atmosphere is doing all the work, and “it just takes 300+ pages to get there.” Maxim reads to modern readers less as brooding than as controlling, decades older than the wife he manages and dismisses, which makes the shelving of this as romance sit badly. Some find “the characters were flat, one-dimensional, and unlikable.” A contemporary critic filed it as a “lowbrow story with a middlebrow finish.”

— the honest librarian

8h

honest hours

11

sittings