I first read Daphne du Maurier’s novel Rebecca when I was eleven or twelve years old and again when I was a teenager. I enjoyed it hugely, I found it the most wonderful, exhilarating read. I was in any case a voracious reader and didn’t have much difficulty in racing through many a novel a week. I knew that Rebecca had left its mark upon me, knew that I remembered its characters and particularly its setting, not to mention its romantic, dramatic story very vividly. But I did not read it again until adult life and when I did so I discovered not only, all over again, a wonderfully readable, marvellously exciting, highly coloured story – I realised that Rebecca was a very fine novel indeed, a much better novel than not only I had given it credit for but, I think, than many critics had assumed. It ranks with Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre, as one of the great romantic English novels of all time. I use the word ‘romantic’ in the most complex sense, and not simply to mean ‘a love story’.

Rebecca is a novel of power and atmosphere. It is about obsession. It is about evil and its power and about the influence and hold of the past over us in the present. It is about vulnerability an loss, about fear, about death. It is a ghost story and a detective story (thought as the latter, it does not altogether hold water – it is possible to query legitimately some of the workings of the plot, with regard to the finding of the boat and Rebecca’s drowning). It is tightly plotted. It has the most powerful sense of place. The English novel has always been strong on a sense of place – think of Dickens, think of Thomas Hardy. Places have, or can have, the most enormous impact upon people’s lives. They can in many ways be characters in their own right. Think of Hardy again. The places where people grow up, in which they work ,the weather, the atmosphere, the everyday life of those places has always been of enormous importance to people, especially when those places are isolated, dramatic or have some other powerful appeal.

Rebecca makes its impact with the opening chapter when, in a dream, the young Mrs de Winter re-visits the house called Manderley, years after it has been emptied after the great fire. Manderley has been taken over by nature, gone back to nature. The grounds are overgrown, the terrifying, giant wild rhododendrons have crept over the pathway, trees are enormous, it is a jungle. The house is deserted, an empty shell in the moonlight. It is the most gothic and romantic of settings, an evocation of a place and a past and its effect upon a character like almost no other that I know in any novel.

The character of Rebecca are extremely interesting. Maxim de Winter is reminiscent of Charlotte Bronte’s Mr Rochester, in Jane Eyre, and of Emily Bronte’s cruel hero with whom the heroine is so passionately in love, Heathcliffe, in her novel Wuthering Heights. Maxim is the older man with whom the young, vulnerable, impressionable girl falls in love. He is rich, aristocratic in a way (though he has no title), imperious, sardonic, possibly a little cruel. He is used to getting his own way., He is haunted by the past and the mistakes that he made in that past, by the figure of his first wife and the life she led and caused him to lead, and by her death. He is a wanderer, and a lonely man, bitter, solitary. In the hotel at Monte Carlo in which the heroine encounters him, he appears to be a remote, aloof, sad, desperately attractive figure and inevitably she falls in love with him. She herself is an orphan, genteel-poor, obliged to earn a living by being a companion to the appalling, vulgar rich American woman Mrs Van Hopper. She is sensitive, thoughtful, naïve, gauche and she appeals to the uncertain adolescent in all of us. But she is also clear sighted and clear minded, in many ways mature for her age, though she has little sense of her own self and her own worth, and little sense of humour. And yet she is by no means merely a weak cipher of a thing; it is understandable that she falls in love with Maxim de Winter but this is not merely a silly childish passion. It is indeed love which will mature and grow, caring and concerned, into a fully adult passion.

The housekeeper Mrs Danvers, who makes her first appearance when the shy new young Mrs de Winter arrive, after her sudden surprise marriage, at Manderley, is the blackest of villainesses. She is a woman of power and pent-up rage, deeply snobbish, deeply scornful, instantly hostile and malevolent towards the new Mrs de Winter. Her loyalties were with Rebecca, her heart, and her longings remain with the dead wife. The novel is about her desire for revenge of behalf of Rebecca upon the new bride who has supplanted her at Manderley, and in Maxim’s affections. She succeeds.

Other characters are background figures and less memorable. But Rebecca is full of great dramatic scenes, wonderful set pieces, marvellous atmosphere, sinister, beautiful, grand and grotesque. There are some heart-stopping moments, some unforgettable scenes of power and passion. But above all, Rebecca says something about the situation of women, and about vulnerability and the power of one human being over another., It is not merely a good story, not merely dramatic, not merely a romance or a thriller. If it were only these things it would not have had the lasting effect upon us that it continues to have. It would be a good novel perhaps, a wonderful, thrilling read – but it would not be a serious study of human affairs, human relationships, the human heart.

All these things I thought about Rebecca when I read it. I read several other novels by Daphne du Maurier, none of which I greatly enjoyed – partly because many of them are historical and this is not at all my favourite genre, partly because I simply felt they were nowhere near as good and powerful as Rebecca. I think, in all honesty, that du Maurier is, in the long term, a one-book writer, thought some of the short stories, notably Don’t Look Now, and The Birds (both of them made into memorable films) are very fine indeed. But I had not thought a very great deal about Daphne du Maurier nor read the novel Rebecca for many years when, in 1991, a letter dropped onto the doormat from the literary agent representing the Daphne du Maurier estate. (Dame Daphne herself died in 1987. The estate consists of her three surviving children, and they handle, with the agency, all rights in Daphne du Maurier’s work).

The letter asked me if I would consider writing a sequel to Rebecca. It came as a complete surprise. I had no idea that anyone had ever considered a sequel as a possibility – I certainly had not. I was certainly not averse to the idea because I think that there is a place for the sequel as a valid literary genre (which I will come to in a moment).

The first thing I knew that I had to do before I made any reply was to re-read Rebecca. I did and was excited first of all, again, by the realisation that it was a stunningly good novel and as good a read as I remembered. But my other feeling was an even more intense excitement when I realised that I was imagining a future for the characters, and understanding that the story was not by any means over, although the detective element in it had certainly been solved and I had no desire whatsoever to unpick Daphne du Maurier’s plot. I accepted the commission with pleasure and a great feeling of exhilaration. As a matter of fact, I had a new novel of my own already begun but it was not really ready to be written and so it was perfectly possible to put it on one side in order to write Mrs de Winter, as my sequel became.

Now a word about sequels. There is some curious idea abroad that it is much easier to write a sequel than to write one’ own original novel. But of course a sequel is one’s own original novel. The fact that the character come to a writer bearing something of their past life and doings with them makes no difference at all to the fact that the new writer has to give them a future, a new story and to develop their characters in new situations. In this respect it is no different from writing a novel as it were from scratch – except that actually it is possibly a little harder. You can begin your own new characters with a clean sheet and do exactly what you want with them. You have to obey the rules of the characters you inherit from another writer.

I stated very clearly that my intention was not in any way to pastiche Daphne du Maurier’s own style. I am not a writer who is interested in doing this as I was already very well and long established, with a number of novels to my credit and I had no wish or need to submerge my own style or independence of creative thinking in the ghost of another writer. But in fact my own style and way of writing, particularly my addiction to places and my way of building certain major scenes into a novel, is not a hundred miles away from the style and method of writing Daphne du Maurier employs in Rebecca. I felt that the marriage between us would be a good one though neither of us would lose our individual, independent identity.

I set myself certain rules. I believe very firmly that no reader should of course have to read a sequel and that I would not do anything in my novel that retrospectively affected anything Daphne du Maurier already had done. So that the reader reading Mrs de Winter would not then go back to Rebecca and find that, after what I had done the characters in the future, the past was altered. Therefore, for example, I could not give the heroine, Mrs de Winter, a Christian name – Daphne du Maurier did not give her one in Rebecca and if I had named her then she would have been made for du Maurier’s novel too.

If you consider the adaptation of a novel by someone else into, for example, a play, or a screenplay for a film, you realise at once that the adapter, whoever they may be, has to take the original text and change it very much. They ending may be altered, characters may change, scenes may be omitted and new ones added. The book or play is not at all the same in the adaptation as it was in the beginning, though of course the original is always there to be read. I was not going to change anything in Rebecca, I was simply writing a new novel of my own, very much on my own, using characters created originally by Daphne du Maurier and a little of their first story, to take off, to launch them into a future created by me. The two books reflect one another and may be seen as parallel, but I think that they do not in any, as it were, tread on one another’s toes.

I re-read Rebecca very quickly once again and then put it firmly away and did not look at it at all during the time that I was writing Mrs de Winter, apart from checking one or two fact that I was afraid I might have mis-remembered and naturally did not want to get wrong. The book was entirely mine, everything I invented I invented for myself.

People have asked me whether I considered Daphne du Maurier and her opinion, as far as I could guess that bit, when I begun to write Mrs de Winter. My feelings as a writer myself are, first of all that it would not trouble me, after my death, if another writer created a sequel to any of my own novels, so long as it was done in the right spirit and was very much their book and did not in any way try to re-write or alter that one that I had written. People may judge for themselves. I would in fact be flattered that my characters had strength and my created atmosphere was of sufficient power and interest to excite another writer to want to take them over. I also very firmly believe that no novelist, once they have created a novel, created characters, has any right to dictate their future, and more than they have a right to dictate how a reader shall read their books. You write novels and you send them out into the world, really rather as you have children, bring them up and then do the same. You view their future with interest, you are concerned about their doings and how people will take to them – or not – but you have no longer control over them. A novel is in many ways like a child you have brought up and let go. I can see no earthly reason why any writer should ever object to a sequel to one of their books. The objection of course would come is the writer of the sequel decided to destroy every copy of the original book in order that that should never be read again! I think it is perfectly legitimate to object to adaptations which distort and change the original. I myself have suffered from good and bad adaptations and bad ones may be very distressing. But of course what one has firmly to remember always is that no reader has to read a sequel, no-one has to pay any attention to an adaptation and the original is still always there.

I hope this may give some background to my intentions and to the writing of Mrs de Winter, for those intending to study the two and, as many students do, write an extended essay based upon the writing of a sequel. It is an interesting subject, a valid literary genre. I think sequels work best when the writer of the sequel is roughly matched to the writer of the original – this is why it is very difficult indeed for sequels to the really great writers of the world to be successful – we simply do not have writers of the stature of Jane Austen, Charlotte Bronte, Henry James, Tolstoy or who you will.

A sequel is not simply a continuation of the plot – how dull that would be. The plot is always the least important part of any novel. A sequel is a valid novel by a novelist which takes over where the previous writer left off but then develops in very much its own way, its own style and has an existence entirely independent of its original.

I shall never write a sequel to any other novel. I simply cannot think of another book that I would be tempted by or as excited by as I was by Rebecca and I very much believe in doing something different each time and have very many books that I want to write which are inspired purely within myself and not from anything, or any other writer, outside of me.