- Loved the first chapter. Sad, melancholy, hints of haunting.
The rest of the book, as far as I read it (more than one-third) did little to keep my interest. "Poor maiden marries handsome widow, only to fret about her new role, uncertainty, all that uncertainty oozing out of her, and what, oh dear, what happened to his former wife?!?"
Long-winded, boring. Too much repetition.
Ending of the first chapter though:
I would think of the blown lilac, and the Happy Valley. These things were permanent, they could not be dissolved. They were memories that cannot hurt. All this I resolved in my dream, while the clouds lay across the face of the moon, for like most sleepers I knew that I dreamed. In reality I lay many hundred miles away in an alien land, and would wake, before many seconds had passed, in the bare little hotel bedroom, comforting in its very lack of atmosphere. I would sigh a moment, stretch myself and turn, and opening my eyes, be bewildered at that glittering sun, that hard, clean sky, so different from the soft moonlight of my dream. The day would lie before us both, long no doubt, and uneventful, but fraught with a certain stillness, a dear tranquility we had not known before. We would not talk of Manderley. I would not tell my dream. For Manderley was ours no longer. Manderley was no more.
I wonder if the name itself, Manderley, rang true to my mind, for I hold the memories of Mandalay dear, and could not completely seperate the two
