Rebecca

My favorite novel. I must have read it a dozen time over the years. Not for the melodrama, however, and it was certainly melodramatic, but for the writing and the lovely words and phrases Daphne Du Maurier put to the page. I actually swoon when I read such wordiness. It stuns me.

Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again. It seemed to me I stood by the iron gate leading to the drive, and for a while I could not enter for the way was barred to me. There was a padlock and chain upon the gate. I called in my dream to the lodge keeper, and had no answer, and peering closer through the rusted spokes of the gate I saw the lodge was uninhabited.

No smoke came from the chimney, and the little lattice windows gaped forlorn. Then, like all dreamers, I was possessed of a sudden with supernatural powers and passed like a spirit through the barrier before me.

And later....

There was Manderley, our Manderley, secretive and silent as it had always been, the grey stone shining in the moonlight of my dream, the mullioned windows reflecting the green lawns and the terrace. Time could not wreck the perfect symmetry of those walls, nor the site itself, a jewel in the hollow of a hand.

And then there is the first paragraph of chapter five....

I am glad it cannot happen twice, the fever of first love. For it is a fever, and a burden too, whatever the poets may say. They are not brave, the days when we are twenty-one. ( I love that line) They are full of little cowardice's, little fears without foundation.

Oh, I do love her writing. She was a master mood-setter.