In Rebecca the most powerful presence in the house is that of one absent person – the first Mrs de Winter. They were real, fallible human beings, and as John and I learned more about their past – and about Jean – I understood how their characters and attitude had been formed. Even when I could not believe that the family members did not realize it was a different man, I was so engrossed in the story that I did not care.

The next day he learns Françoise's dowry is in trust for a male heir, but if she dies or reaches the age of 50 without having had a son, Jean will inherit the money instead.Suddenly, he's a man with a depressed wife, a crumbling chateau, a failing glass foundry, a mistress in town, a mistress in the house, a sister who hasn't spoken to him in fifteen years, a troubled daughter and mysteriously ill mother. In this case, or rather, my interpretation of it, is that she created a what if scenario of her own heritage. The image used in the site header is a fragment from Benozzo Gozzoli's fresco Procession of the Magi. The narrator continually suspects various members of his family - including his doppelgänger - of not only duplicity, but also of some evil deeds in the past.

While both men try to come to terms with their destinies, the women are in a constant battle for the alpha position in the family.For instance, what if her ancestors did not land up in England but remained in France, running a glass-blowing factory (the verrerie). I knew that everything I had said or done had implicated me further, driven me deeper, bound me more closely still to that man whose body was not my body, whose mind was not my mind, whose thoughts and actions were a world apart, and yet whose inner substance was part of my nature, part of my secret self. When she's found in the well at the glassworks, John discovers that Jean murdered Duval and threw his body in the well, accusing him of being a Nazi collaborator. His double, Jean de Gue, is self-centered, extroverted, and the head of a large French family and a failing business. I haven’t read “The Birds” (only watched Hitchcock’s very loose adaptation), but her short story “Don’t Look Now” is on my TBR list and I expect a lot from it.

Take a look around you, at all those vast legions of cynical, weary, burnt-out souls - lost in their private hells.A story that examines identity and fate in a thoughtful way, written in the author's elegant but provoking pen. Like the second Mrs de Winter, he is relatively naïve and is removed from the “real life” initially, going later on both the physical and on the spiritual journey to get to know the depths of life, changing himself in the process. John, our narrator, is a lonely academic, someone who always felt like an observer rather than a participant in life. I was delighted to be able to add copies to my collection; and to realise that I hadn’t looked for those books before because they made such an impression on me the first time I read them that I hadn’t needed to look for them again; and to know that those books would be ready and waiting for me when those impressions faded enough for me to need to go back. Memo to myself: don’t be so dismissive of books written before I was born – I can learn much from them and the medicine to cure my phobia is simple enough, seek out my next one PDQ.