Rebecca's Tale

Rebecca's Tale by Sally Beauman
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

While I don't think that Rebecca's Tale is quite the great classic that its literary source is, I enjoyed it very much on a second reading, possibly more than the first time. It's certainly a page turner in the way Rebecca is, and it's also just as full of unreliable narrators interpreting stories, at second hand, that were unreliable start with!

Having read it I still don't know if Rebecca was a Jezebel or a woman multiply wronged... although it does seem to me that she might have been a combination of both, and more, and had become the former because of the latter. And I certainly come out of this book disliking Maxim de Winter even more than ever, although somehow I feel more pity for the second Mrs de Winter.

Just like the original novel, Rebecca's Tale has that power, for me, of seeming like a *true* story, and that's got to be a measure of its quality.

Rebecca's tale is elusive, frustrating and poignant. Much like the original...

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