Fable & The Verbivore

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Episode 165: Rebecca by Daphne Du Maurier

Bethany Stedman

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Ep 165: Rebecca by Daphne Du Maurier Fable & The Verbivore

Today, Fable and the Verbivore share our November book club episode on the classic novel Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier.

This episode serves as our wrap up for our fall monster and spooky storytelling episodes. This novel has not been out of print in the over 80 years since its initial release and we have a lot of opinions about this story.

Also, *spoiler alert*, we felt that there was no way to talk about this book without digging into the twists that come about 75% of the way through the story. We’d recommend reading the book first, before listening to this episode.   

As we start our conversation, we talk about some of the unique choices that the author made which make this story so distinctive. Things like:

  • An unnamed and unreliable narrator who the reader none-the-less has a very close connection to her feelings and mindset

  • The story is told in retrospect from the perspective of an older version of the protagonist and then we’re thrust back into the past with a younger version, but the older version breaks in and makes comments

  • The atmospheric descriptions and potent metaphor set a definite and distinct tone and mood, but at times it feels like they go on beyond what benefits the story.

We also talk about some classic narratives that influenced this story – it feels like a 20th century Jane Eyre, a dark take on Cinderella, and a strange take on the classic folktale of Bluebeard. We also felt that elements of the Secret Life of Walter Mitty were present in the vivid and intricate fantasies that the unnamed narrator indulges in throughout the story.

Towards the end of this conversation, we compare Rebecca to our feelings about Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park – which we felt had some great things to teach us but was also a bit too heavy handed for us to really say that we enjoyed it. Our takeaway is that we can learn something from things that make us dislike parts of it and want to throw it across the room.

We hope you enjoy this conversation. We’ve had so much fun exploring monster stories and spooky stories throughout the last several weeks.

Keep reading, writing, and putting your voice out there!

Into the woods,

Fable & The Verbivore

Notes:

This episode serves as our wrap up for our fall monster and spooky storytelling episodes. This novel has not been out of print in the over 80 years since its initial release and we have a lot of opinions about this story.

Also, *spoiler alert*, we felt that there was no way to talk about this book without digging into the twists that come about 75% of the way through the story. We’d recommend reading the book first, before listening to this episode.   

Here are a few articles and videos we referenced for this conversation:

We touch on several of our previous podcast episodes. They are as follows:

Books and Films Mentioned:

Music from: https://filmmusic.io
‘Friendly day’ by Kevin MacLeod (https://incompetech.com)
Licence: CC BY (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)