I am no fan of fan fiction, and I did not read Mrs. de Winter, Susan Hill’s sequel to Rebecca, but I would love to indulge in Wide Sargasso Sea, Jean Rhys’ apparently excellent take on the first Mrs. Rochester of Jane Eyre.
As Sally Beauman wrote in The New Yorker – which I used for research when writing my Rebecca thesis – Hill missed a major opportunity. Readers of Rebecca yearn for more of her origin story – something du Maurier only hints at through Mrs. Danver’s narrative – and don’t need more Manderley memories. “Pursued in theory by the furies of guilt and retribution,” Beauman writes, “they [the de Winters] take off for Scotland, Italy, the Rhine, even Turkey at one point, but the furies appear to lose interest in them, as does the reader, almost at once.”
Winter is coming and Wide Sargasso Sea sounds like the perfect addition to a cold season cozy reading list.
Time to brew a pot of tea.