![]() ![]() ![]() De Winter, now returned to England 12 years after the burning of Manderley. Hill has chosen, quite inexplicably, to ignore any of the myriad possible twists on the original book and play it completely straight, subjecting the unfortunate reader to 349 pages of du Maurieresque overwriting in the unrelieved, and frankly appalling, company of the second Mr. De Winter” by the usually excellent English novelist Susan Hill, comes as such a disappointment. The scope, it seemed, would be limitless. You could be revisionist, deconstructionist, or parodic you could discuss sin, or female anger, or the English class system you could write a love story, or a thriller, a social satire, or a feminist polemic. You could be as funny, or as solemn, as you chose. The gorgeously overblown tale of Maxim De Winter, brooding English landowner his first wife, Rebecca, beautiful, charming, and rotten to the core and her dowdy (but implicitly sterling of character) unnamed successor, would seem to hold out to its lucky sequellist a veritable cornucopia of opportunities. ![]() ![]() This reviewer, of all reviewers, is not about to cast stones at other writers of sequels and Daphne Du Maurier’s “Rebecca,” of all novels, seemed ripe to have its sequel written. ![]()
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