Last year The New York Times did a well-deserved tribute to Daphne du Maurier:
“What happened was “Rebecca,” an instant best seller that has never gone out of print and still sells about 50,000 copies a year, according to its British publishers. The novel inspired the film adaptation directed by Alfred Hitchcock, spinoffs and a line of watches. It even found admirers on both sides of the war: Neville Chamberlain took his copy with him when he flew to Munich to meet Hitler, and the Germans, in turn, fashioned a cryptogram from the text.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/06/books/daphne-du-maurier-enthusiast.html
What the article failed to point out is that Rebecca is still assigned reading in many American high schools and is, therefore, often not available during the school year at one’s local library (a fact happily discovered by this writer just last week).
Another new discovery: a scholarly introduction to the novel. When I was writing my graduate school thesis on Rebecca in the late 1990s, this did not exist. Rebecca was still published in mass-market paperback form, replete with red satin cover image typical of drug store romance novels. You opened the book and there you were, right in the opening dream sequence.
I always felt that Rebecca deserved so much more; happily Everyman’s Library has provided. Their 2017 publication of the novel includes a scholarly instruction by British author, critic and journalist Lucy Hughes-Hallet, who writes an extraordinary appreciation of the imagery, subtlety, and complexity of this stunning novel that simply won’t go away.
For a Sunday bonus, read about the man who learned to love literature from Rebecca:
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/aug/20/rebecca-daphne-du-maurier-classic-literature