My Cousin Rachel

My Cousin Rachel - Daphne Du Maurier

My Cousin Rachel's opening, with a dead body swinging on a gibbet, reminded me somewhat of Great Expectations. That the narrator is also an orphan called Philip cemented the connection. In some ways you can look at it as a version of Great Expectations PULPed and reconstituted. It is also unmistakably from the same hand as Rebecca, using a similar structure and setting.

Philip, aged seven (one year older than Pip when he meets Magwitch) has been taken to see the hanged man by his cousin and guardian Ambrose, who feels that it will teach him a lesson. (Let's not go into whether this is an appropriate teaching method for seven year olds. Du Maurier's supposedly inappropriate relationship with her father finds an echo here.)  The body as thing is difficult for Philip to accept but when the connection is made to a person he knew this becomes even more so. "I wished he had not named the man. Up to that moment the body had been a dead thing, without identity. It would come into my dreams, lifeless and horrible. I knew that very well from the first instant I had set my eyes upon the gibbet. Now it would have connexion with reality..." The difference between judging someone you don't know and someone you do will play a major part in the novel.

Rebecca

Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier

This book famously begins with the account of a dream. Another dream features at the end. Indeed the whole book inhabits a dreamscape charged with the emotions of the nameless narrator.  Indeed at times it seems as if the narrator is being annihilated by the powerful emotions raging around her.
The novel opens with that famous first line "Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again." On one level this tumbles us into the story and as it progresses we are always trying to catch up to that initial moment and all that is implied within it. Why is it that it is now only in her dreams that the narrator goes to Manderley? And Du Maurier goes further, telling us us more and more of what is to come in the opening salvo of this novel as the first two chapters set in the NOW of the narrator prefigure the events that we have yet to hear in our journey into her past.