Reading Group Roundup: Rebecca

The report this month comes from Wandsworth, where one of the groups chose Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca. The novel was first published in 1938 and has never been out of print. It has been dramatised on stage and in several films, including Alfred Hitchcock’s classic 1940 version and more recently on Netflix with Lily James, Armie Hammer and Kristin Scott Thomas.

It’s a gripping mix of romance, ghost story and tense psychological thriller with three main characters: a naïve young woman, a dead wife and a house. It begins with a strange dream about the house and ends with its violent destruction.

The story is told by a heroine whose name we never learn. She starts as a shy and awkward girl in Monte Carlo working as a paid companion to a rich and vulgar American woman with a habit of stubbing out cigarettes in anything close at hand – dishes of butter, jars of face cream, whatever. On to the scene appears the dark and dashing Maxim de Winter who rescues the girl and takes her back to Manderley, his enormous and beautiful house by the sea.

But what begins as a happily-ever-after love story becomes a dark and haunting tale of jealousy, power struggle and death.

The Wandsworth group loved it. Even the new member who hadn’t had a chance to read it yet was swept up by the excitement and left the meeting determined to get stuck in as soon as he got back to his cell.

Some of the group had read it before, several of them more than once. One fan said he’d read it ‘many times’ and had planned just to skim it before the meeting. ‘But once I started, I was pulled right back in.’ Another who was also re-reading couldn’t put it down and finished it in a single – very long – sitting.

A measure of the book’s power is its ability to draw the reader in and identify with the narrator, not only a female voice but one who emphasises her own dull insignificance. Quite a feat to hook a group of all-male readers not used to viewing the world or themselves through a lens like that. Everyone agreed on the brilliant characters and our uncertainty about them. Is Maxim a dashing hero or a coercive controller? Is the girl a vulnerable innocent we’re all rooting for or a subtle manipulator playing her own power game? Was the dead wife Rebecca a cruel and destructive woman, or a gloriously independent one who refused to be controlled by other people? And then there’s the brilliantly creepy housekeeper Mrs Danvers, a masterpiece of devious obsession.

Lots of disagreement in the group about the ending – a satisfying love story or an unsettling story about murder, class and collusion. But everyone agreed it’s a cracking good read.

Prison Reading Groups (PRG) runs over 100 groups in more than 80 prisons nationwide. Groups choose what they read and are given new copies to keep or pass on to others.

PRG is part of Give a Book.