18 saturday review 1GR Saturday November 14 2020 | the timesGETTY IMAGESfiction
Rereading Mrs de Winter by Susan Hill
good manners and English composure. In
her best-known novel, The Woman in
Black (1983), powerful emotion is repre-
sented by the supernatural breaking
through. What better project, therefore,
for Hill, than revisiting Daphne du Mauri-
er’s Rebecca, in which the chief character,
everyone’s obsession, is never actually
seen or heard, because she is already dead.
Published in 1993, Mrs de Winter is mag-
nificently atmospheric, with everything
kept on the brink of the occult — reve-
nants, haunted houses, gothic storms. As
in du Maurier’s original, the dead still exert
their power over the living. The story ess-
entially picks up from where Rebecca ends,
but ten or so years on. Readers, beware,
there are plot spoilers in this article for
those reading the du Maurier original.
We follow Maxim de Winter and his
still-young bride as they wander the Conti-
nent like guilty things, drifting about Swiss
and Italian hotels and rented villas, killing
time, terrified they will be recognised:
“That man is a murderer. He shot Rebec-
ca.” The couple come back to Cornwall for
Maxim’s sister’s funeral. Jack Favell,
Rebecca’s lover, turns up, leering and
threatening blackmail. And a wreath
appears on the grave, the card seemingly
signed by Rebecca. Who could be behind
it? And what happened to Mrs Danvers?
What interests Hill more than the trap-
pings of a revenge plot, or a continuationof the plot of Rebecca, is
the psychological drama.
Her Maxim, for example,
isn’t the spry, confident
Laurence Olivier of the
film adaptation; he isn’t
cool and masculine — in
Hill’s novel he is overbear-
ing, humourless, bullying,
arrogant with waiters and
porters, dismissive and full
of tension. So you can im-
agine the effect this has
had over a long period on
the (unnamed) second Mrs
de Winter, who, as in the du
Maurier, narrates in the
first person. The novel is a
searing study in neurosis —
and of a clammy, oppressive
marriage.
The young wife is pan-
dered to like a baby. She is
gauche, always apologising,
crying, shaking, fainting,
blushing, “sour with misery”.
She continuously tries to pla-
cate Maxim, “protecting him,
being his only companion,
learning tricks to keep
memory from springing up”. It amounts to
spousal abuse, the ways she accepts being
crushed, belittled. When she by chance
comes across a photograph of Rebecca inan old copy of a society magazine,
for instance, Maxim “behaved as if
I were somehow to blame and had
done this thing on purpose”.
“Embarrassed and ashamed” or
“powerless and inferior”, no won-
der she seethes: “Resentment and
bitterness and a horrible self-pity
began to simmer and stir about
within me.” Nature itself seems
roused on her behalf — the
surging seas and high winds,
the hiss and suck of tides on the
pebbles. Hill loves describing
the misty forests and tangled
gardens — the temperamental
undergrowth and suppressed
hysteria, which is “like some
underground river... My
dreams,” the narrator says,
“were dreadful, crazed, full of
whisperings... and moving,
menacing shadows.”
A few loose ends remain:
why was the Manderley estate
abandoned and wasn’t there
any hefty insurance payout?
What did Maxim do in the war,
as he and his wife seem to have
avoided “the blackout, the evacuees, the
shortages”? Despite these unanswered
questions, Mrs de Winter doesn’t only live
up to Rebecca, in terms of strangeness and
spooky lyricism Hill surpasses it.S
usan Hill is a wonderful writer —
like Iris Murdoch without the silly
philosophising or Muriel Spark
shorn of spite. A Change for the
Better (1969), set in a damp and
shabbily genteel retirement resort (Hill’s
native Scarborough, one suspects) delight-
ed me with its refusal to settle for happy
endings: “Cheer me up? What kind of man
do you take me for? I’m not to be cheered
up like a convalescent child.”
Hill’s people are prickly and unpleasant,
but are always viewed with compassion.
There are good reasons why men and
women finally flip. Strange Meeting (1971),
for one, is an account of First World War
horrors — the destruction of innocence,
and how young officers, should they sur-
vive the front, spend the rest of their lives
working to keep “a central poise and calm-
ness”, while underneath they are in tur-
moil. In Air and Angels (1991) it is the unex-
pected sight of a beautiful girl walking by
the river that tips a person over the edge.
This is Hill’s subject — the passion,
fever, terror that lurk on the other side ofRoger Lewis relishes
the strangeness and
spooky lyricism of
this sequel to Rebecca
a f I d “ d b b w r s t p t g u h u d “ w m w a a W aidd“