Sally Beauman

Page Updated: 17/09/01

Sally Beauman

Rebecca's Tale

17 Sep 01

Books By Sally Beauman

About the Author (Photo by Charles Hopkinson)

Bibliography

First British Edition Little,Brown (2000)

Rebecca's Tale
Sally Beauman, the bestselling author of Destiny, has written the most daring and brilliant novel of her career.
Taking Daphne du Maurier’s classic novel Rebecca, she moves her story on to the early 1950s and explores the unsolved mysteries that surround her heroine’s life and tragic death.

‘There was never a trial, so no advocate ever spoke for Rebecca. She’s been condemned to silence for twenty years. She can’t defend herself or correct the lies. Could I perform that service for Rebecca?’

‘I turned the page and discovered the two title words written in black ink, in a child’s spiky hand, the tail of the last letter curling down the page in a long punning flourish: Rebecca’s Tale…’
April 1951. It is twenty years since the death of Rebecca, the strikingly beautiful first wife of Maxim de Winter. It is twenty years since the inquest, which famously – and controversially- passed a verdict of suicide. Twenty years since Manderley, the de Winter’s ancient family seat was razed to the ground.
But Rebecca’s tale is just beginning.
On the twentieth anniversary of her death, family friend Colonel Julyan receives an anonymous parcel in the post. It contains a black notebook with two handwritten words on the title page – Rebecca’s Tale – and two pictures: a photograph of Rebecca as a young child, and a postcard of Manderley. Rebecca once asked Julyan to ensure she was buried in the churchyard facing the sea: if she ended up in the Winter crypt, she warned, she’d come back to haunt him. Now, it seems, she has finally kept her promise.
Julyan’s conscience has never been clear over the official version of Rebecca’s death. Was it really suicide, or was it actually murder? Was Rebecca the manipulative, promiscuous femme fatale her husband claimed, or the gothic heroine of tragic proportions that others had suggested? The official story, the ‘truth’, has only ever had Maxim’s version of events to consider. But all that is about to change…
Sally Beauman has taken Daphne du Maurier’s celebrated twentieth-century classic, Rebecca, and crafted a compelling companion for the twenty-first. Haunting, evocative, mesmerising, Rebecca’s Tale is for anyone who has ever dreamt of going back to Manderley again.

The Story Behind the Writing of Rebecca’s Tale
Sally Beauman’s interest in Daphne du Maurier goes back a long way, as she has always been interested in feminist themes in popular literature. She has also known and loved the particular area of Cornwall where du Maurier lived and which she used as her setting for Rebecca. For many years, while her son was still a child, they used to rent a house there with friends.
Her reasons for writing Rebecca’s Tale are complex and fascinating. About six years ago, she wrote an article for the New Yorker about Daphne du Maurier and Rebecca. This gave her the chance to think about Rebecca very deeply, and to ask why the novel has been such a continuing success since it was first published in 1938, during which time it has never been out of print.
She thinks there are many possible answers, but one of them is the very central mystery inside Rebecca itself. By the end of the novel, there are many questions du Maurier left deliberately unanswered. We never discover what kind of person Rebecca really was.
We know that she was Maxim de Winters’ first wife, a beautiful and witty woman who ran the huge house of Manderley with great style. We also know that she was murdered.
But where did she come from? Who were her parents? And what exactly were the circumstances of her life at Manderley that led to her death?
In her article, she said that if anyone was to write a spin-off of Rebecca, what they should write was already hidden in the novel itself: a story from Rebecca’s point-of-view. This idea refused to go away, but she did not re-consider it until 1998 when she was invited to speak at the Daphne du Maurier Festival.
At a dinner hosted by du Maurier’s son, Christian Browning, she spoke to him about her idea for Rebecca’s story. He replied, ‘So why don’t you do it?’
Rebecca’s Tale is more of a companion than a straight sequel to Rebecca, akin to Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea, her account of Bertha Rochester prior to Jane Eyre. It can be read as a free-standing novel in its own right, whether or not you have read Rebecca. The voice throughout is not a pastiche, but Sally Beauman’s imaginative story of a heroine for the 21st century.
Praise for Sally Beauman
Rebecca’s Tale
This is a real achievement. The Rebecca section is outstanding – a passionate, vivid, but still elusive voice. And the plotting is terrific – as compelling as the original but with its own distinct personality’ Joanna Trollope
‘Compelling, absorbing, captivating, haunting – Sally Beauman’s most ambitious and imaginative so far’. Elaine Showalter
‘Always innovative and alive with echoes of Grimm, Shakespeare and Emily Brönte, Sally Beauman’s sparkling version of du Maurier’s story suggests myriad, tantalising possibilities of interpretation from four characters’ first person perspectives.’ Professor Helen Taylor, Head of English at Exeter University
Sextet
‘A hugely entertaining read, seriously romantic and with a terrific sense of atmosphere’ Kate Sunders, Daily Express
Danger Zones
‘Compulsively readable and utterly engrossing – hooks you from page one until you reluctantly surrender it in the small hours’ The Times
Lovers and Liars
‘A complex, sexy thriller… a glorious tangle of half-truths and double lies, with a touching love story at the heart of it…’ Penny Vincenzi, Sunday Express
Dark Angel
‘A rich and engrossing read’ Evening Standard
Destiny
‘The most talked about novel in years’ Daily Mail

About The Author
Sally Beauman was born in Devon in 1944 and brought up in the West Country. She was educated at Redland High School for Girls in Bristol, and at Girton College, Cambridge. She has an MA in English Literature.
After graduating, she moved to the USA, where she lived for three years, first in Washington DC, then New York, and travelled extensively. She began her career as a journalist in America, joining the staff of the newly launched New York magazine, of which she became an associate editor, and for whom she continued to write for, as a journalist and film critic, after her return to England in 1970. She has had a distinguished career as a journalist and critic, winning the Catherine Pakenham Award for her writing, and becoming the youngest-ever editor of Queen magazine (now Harper’s & Queen). She has contributed to many leading newspapers and magazines in both the UK and the USA, including the Daily Telegraph, the Sunday Times, Observer, Vogue, the New York Times and the New Yorker. It was her article about Daphne du Maurier, commissioned by Tina Brown, and published in The New Yorker in November 1993, which first gave her the idea for writing Rebecca de Winter’s version of events at Manderley – an idea that subsequently became the novel, Rebecca’s Tale.
She wrote several short pseudonymous romances and two serious works of non-fiction, including a definitive history of The Royal Shakespeare Company (published by Oxford University Press in 1982), before she embarked on her first full length novel written under her own name. This was Destiny, bought for a then-record sum by Bantam Books in the USA, Transworld in the UK. Destiny went on to become a New York Times No.1 bestseller, and was also a No.1 bestseller in the UK, Canada, Australia and South Africa. Both this, and her next novels, Dark Angel, and the three linked thrillers, Lovers and Liars, Danger Zones and Sextet, have been translated into over eighteen languages, and have been bestsellers world wide.
Sally Beauman has lived with the distinguished classical actor, Alan Howard, for twenty eight years; they met when she interviewed him when he was playing Hamlet for the RSC in Trevor Nunn’s production at Stratford in 1970. They have one son who is studying to be a marine biologist. They divide their time between London, Gloucestershire, and a house overlooking the sea on a remote island of the Hebrides; it was built for Alan Howard’s uncle, Sir Compton Mackenzie in 1935, and he wrote Whisky Galore there. It had subsequently become a factory, and they have spent the last two and a half years restoring it: much of Rebecca’s Tale was written there.

Bibliography
N.B. dates and publishers in dark red indicate British First Editions. Dates and publishers in black indicate recent reprints.

Rebecca's Tale (Little,Brown, 2000) Sep 01