Rebecca à la française

Reading Vera was I in “The Willows” or “ Manderley”? Hard to say at times. But no, I was in The Willows, firmly entrencehed. But minus the sinister Danvers at the window with Manderley burning around her. Another woman stood at a window at The Willows. The first wife, Vera, who died not by fired but by falling through the open window to her death.

Liked Rebecca, Vera’s likeness hangs on a wall in The Willows, staring at Everard‘s new wife Lucy. And like Rebecca, Vera does not appear in Von Arnie’s Vera.

But let’s step back. It’s the 1920s, and Everard, a boring man whose platitude-based morality borders on Trumpism captured the heart of ingebue Lucy who is less than half his age. She’s a pretty girl, but none too bright. He is the first man whose sentences she actually understands. She has been used to her father’s intellectual friends, old lefties who discussed politics endlessly, in nuanced terms. Her father has recently died when Lucy meets Everard, a man who speaks in simple terms, a man who thinks there is one side to every question. Her fate is sealed.

Everard tals to Lucy in baby talk, telling her not to worry her pretty little head about his decisions. She’s in heaven, oblivious to her only living relative Aunt Dot’s gentle warnings. Her late father’s friends gradually disappear from her life, like liberals turning off the TV when Trump rambles on. They marry.

Once Everard has caught the fly in his boring Willows’ web the domestic abuse starts. Lucy is locked out in the freezing rain for hours and has to apologize repeatedly until Everard can fully relish her submission. He opposes every thing she desires. She is a virtual prisoner in his house. She obeys his every command. Nothing is good enough for her new husband who is a simple-minded bully. Lucy is isolated from the world. Vera looks at her as she sits at the table to eat. Vera’s eyes follow her and there is a twisted smile on Vera’s mouth.

She falls ill and her aunt Dot tries to help her but is unceremoniously forced to leave The Willows and forbidden to see Lucy again, ever.

We never find out about Vera’s death. Possibly it was suicide. But could Lucy last as long as Vera who had stayed married to Everand for 15 years, the exiled Dot muses.

Apart from Robby Doyle’s The Woman who Walked into Doors, I can’t remember reading a book about domestic violence. And although Vera’s Lucy suffers emotional rather than bodily violence, it is just as harrowing to read about it in Vera.

Lucy and Everard are not similar to Maxim and the second Mrs de Winter except for the age difference. But there are so many “pre-shadows” of Rebecca in this earlier novel that it is, like Everard, creepy.

Still intrigued by von Arrnim my reading of Vera has thrown some light on her life. Is the novel semi-autobiographical? I have read that Vera is based on her disastrous second marriage, to Frank Russell.

I need to find out more. I am on a quest. ( )

Last Night I Dreamt I Went to The Willows Again
Review of the Hesperus Classics paperback (2015) of the Macmillan & Co. hardcover original (1921)

I enjoyed my first ever Elizabeth von Arnim novel, the fictionalized from real-life Elizabeth and her German Garden (1898). It was GR friend JimZ's outstanding 10-star review which convinced me to make Vera my second. I was also curious about the synopsis on GR which said that it was "considered the inspiration for du Maurier’s Rebecca" (1938).

If Arnim's unnamed husband in Elizabeth and her German Garden was the "Man of Wrath," then Everard Wemyss in Vera was the "Man of Petty Tyrannies." We meet Wemyss when he commiserates the young Lucy Entwhistle on the sudden death of her father, having lost his own wife Vera in an apparent accident only weeks earlier. Wemyss soon takes over all funeral arrangements for the Entwhistle family in an early sign of his obsessive controlling nature. A courtship, wedding and honeymoon soon follow, against the instincts of Lucy's Aunt Dot who finally relents, due to Lucy's apparent happiness.

It is on the return from the European honeymoon to the Wemyss country estate "The Willows" that the tyrannical nature of the man is finally revealed. He berates the maids for petty issues about windows, piano coverings, tea settings and meals. Lucy is taken aback and retreats from the scene only to find herself locked out in the rain. Finally she is allowed back in the house and scolded for spoiling Wemyss' happiness on his return home. She sickens shortly after with a cold and though Wemyss is indifferent, Aunt Dot comes from London to her bedside to help nurse her. A final confrontation between the Aunt and Wemyss ensues.

I found Vera to be compulsively readable as the pettiness and obsessive nature of Wemyss is gradually revealed. The synopsis describes its "dark humour" which is another way of saying the man is deranged in his childish obsessions and controls over his wife and household. You are drawn into the understanding that the previous wife Vera likely committed suicide rather than continue to live under those circumstances. There is the dawning horror that Lucy may be condemned to a similar fate.

I didn't think it was that much of a precursor to Rebecca, certainly not more than any other gothic tales of younger wives with older husbands in households / homes haunted by a previous wife / present housekeepers i.e. Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, etc.

Just as Elizabeth and her German Garden was based on Elizabeth von Arnim's first marriage to Count von Arnim, Vera was apparently based on her second marriage to Frank Russell. She managed to escape that marriage as well but gathered up enough material to caricature yet another ex-husband (although they apparently never divorced).

Trivia and Link
Vera is in the public domain and can be read for free at Project Gutenberg online here or can be listened to via a free Librivox recording on YouTube here and at other sources. ( )

Seems like a precursor in some ways to 'Rebecca'. ( )

‘My little love isn’t going to do anything that spoils her Everard’s plans after all the trouble he has taken?’ he said, seeing that with her mouth slightly open she gazed at him in an obvious astonishment and didn’t say a word.

Vera, written in 1921 and partly informed by von Arnim’s marriage to Earl Russell (the older brother to Bertrand), is as fascinating as it is frightening.
Vera tells the story of young Lucy who marries the somewhat older Everard Wemyss and finds herself caught. The tragedy of it is, she doesn’t realise it.
Vera is often described as the prototype for Du Maurier’s Rebecca (1938). In some ways this is quite true:

Vera, like Rebecca, lends her name to the book’s title. Vera, like Rebecca, is the late wife of the husband. Vera, like Rebecca, haunts the young new wife.
However, on levels of dysfunction, Vera surpasses Rebecca by far.

Marriage, Lucy found, was different from what she had supposed; Everard was different; everything was different. For one thing she was always sleepy. For another she was never alone. She hadn’t realised how completely she would never be alone, or, if alone, not sure for one minute to the other of going on being alone. Always in her life there had been intervals during which she recuperated in solitude from any strain; now there were none. Always there had been places she could go to and rest in quietly, safe from interruption; now there were none.

I pretty quickly in the book wanted to shake Lucy and make her see what she was getting into, but I am not sure she would have listened.

As the story progressed, dysfunction turned into what can only be described as a nightmare, and I truly hoped that Lucy, much like von Arnim, would find a means to escape from psycho-Everard’s clutches. Or that she’d push him off a cliff. Or the top floor window.

Well, that was at the very beginning. She soon learned that a doubt in her mind was better kept there. If she brought it out to air it and dispel it by talking it over with him, all that happened was that he was hurt, and when he was hurt she instantly became perfectly miserable. Seeing, then, that this happened about small things, how impossible it was to talk with him of big things; of, especially, her immense doubt in regard to The Willows. ( )

Not one of von Arnim's well-known ones, but SO brilliantly written. As someone married to a man frighteningly reminiscent of Everard Wemyss, I felt the author was writing for me, and that the strange, irrational arguments, to which i am accustomed, actually have been experienced by another!
The novel opens with a young girl sitting outside her house in shock; her beloved father has just died, leaving her an orphan; her only relative a spinster aunt. Along the road comes an older man, apparently in a similar situation following his wife's recent death. Offering help and support to young Lucy, it is no surprise that a relationship soon ensues.
However Everard's behaviour soon comes to seem a little odd - from bestowing caresses and babytalk on his 'Little Love', to becoming rapidly and not always predictably furious at any check to his plans. And when we learn of his late wife's demise- plunging from an upper window, thought to be suicide, we become still more dubious.
This is an extremely tense-making book. The reader is amazed at Everard's lack of perspicacity, expecting Lucy to move happily into the room through whose window Vera took her life. His controlling, overbearing personality and utter self-absorption, lead to a character equally comic and menacing.
"She was afraid of him and she was afraid of herself in relation to him. He seemed outside anything of which she had experience...There seemed no way, at any point, by which one could reach him."
Lucy soon learns that her husband's tactics of bullying and forever taking offence, mean there can never be a frank exchange of views, that she must weigh her every word.
"Come here, my little savage- come and sit on your husban's knee and tell him all about it."
...But she didn't tell him all about it, first because by now she knew that to tell him all about anything was asking for trouble, and second because he didn't really want to know. Everard, she was beginning to realise with much surprise, preferred not to know. He was not merely incurious as to other people's ideas and opinions, he definitely preferred not to know."

The eponymous Vera never appears in person- she is the dead wife, and while Lucy sees her portrait, peruses her books and muses on her, it is with an increasing fellow-feeling...

Based on the author's second marriage (to the brother of philosopher Bertrand Russell), this was a masterly portrait of an emotionally abusive marriage. ( )