Rebecca by Daphne DuMaurier (1938)

I have know about this book for a long time, as I handled many copies of the Latvian translation in the Latvian libraries I have organized. Latvians wanted to be well read in world literature, so had many mostly European authors translated into Latvian. (Wonder who made that decision, or encouraged people like Karklins to translate?) Rebeka was one of those books that was in half the Latvian homes in the U.S. I think I picked it up once and tried reading it, but it starts a bit slowly, so I never got very far. But now it was at the audio book store, and my favorite employee there recommended it.

I don't think I will spoiling more than the very beginning of the story by saying, Rebecca is dead from the very beginning of the book. The story is told by an unnamed character, a young woman working as an assistant for a rich woman visiting Monte Carlo. The rich woman gets sick and is taken care by a nurse, giving our heroine time to spend some time with a Maxim de Winter, who has lost his wife - Rebecca. When the rich woman is ready to move on, the man hastily proposes to our young girl, and she is so enamoured by him, that she accepts. After a honeymoon all over Europe, they return to his stately home - Manderley - in England. Maxim never tells her about Rebecca, but we slowly get bits and pieces about Rebecca from various conversations. It was quickly apparent that there was more to the story about the beautiful woman, who loved to entertain. But DuMaurier spins the story out slowly with suspense.

I understand our narrator was very young - in her early 20's, and naieve, but it was very frustrating to me that she didn't "do" anything when she got to Manderley. I can understand the shyness, the reluctance at such a young age, but it sounded like she was a competent assistant, she could have at least worked at something, once she became the mistress of a mansion. Instead, she didn't even care to explore the house, just went to the morning room as she was told the previous Mrs. de Winter had done, and sat the desk and stared at the previous owners handwriting. The only thing she seemed to do was read, knit, and take walks. She could have gotten interested in the garden, talked to the cooks and asked for at least some favorite food of hers, or at the very least reorganized her bedroom and the morning room to be hers in some way, instead of just coming into someone else's space and leaving it the way it is, as you would in a hotel room. Now Maxim is partly to blame, for not giving her some direction, some idea of what she can do as his wife and mistress of the house, since she was not raised for that role, but men can be rather unaware of things like this.

There were some great supporting characters, like the very creepy housekeeper Mrs. Danvers, the supportive assistant to Maxim -  Frank Crawly, the young servants Alice and Robert that our main character relates to the best, Maxim's sister Beatrice and her husband. In reading a bit about the novel, I have read that Rebecca is considered one of the early gothic novels, and that Mrs. Danvers character has been used, copied, parodied often. Since I hadn't read this book, all those references would not have made sense to me. I also read that Dark Shadows on TV was based on Rebecca. This was one of my favorite shows in high school.