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Before I began writing The Winters, my modern response to Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca, the first thing I did was Google whether another writer had already taken a stab. Turns out there are a few Rebecca retellings, including at least two sequels, one sanctioned by the estate called Rebecca’s Tale by Sally Beauman.
Far from dissuading me, I felt vindicated, and also relieved, because no one had written anything resembling The Winters. Set in modern day Long Island, my unnamed narrator is older and (not much) wiser, her nemesis, not a housekeeper but rather a troubled fifteen-year old stepdaughter-to-be with a grudge, troubling memories, and a healthy Instagram following. Once my narrator arrives at her fiancé’s estate, the plot diverges dramatically from Rebecca, but still takes a few cues from that classic book’s many iconic turns: a dress figures prominently in the plot, a body resurfaces, two in fact, with one bonkers twist at the end.
What makes a book classic enough to inspire a retelling? In my opinion, there are three elements, chief among them, longevity. The book has to have been around so long that parts of the plot have forged with our collective consciousness. You can test this theory by asking people who haven’t read du Maurier’s book or seen Alfred Hitchcock’s movie what Rebecca is about. Chances are they’ll know it’s a mystery, that it’s got something to do with jealousy, and that it involves someone named Rebecca who dies under mysterious circumstances. They may even know about a haunted house, an evil housekeeper. The details might elude them, but they’ll have a general sense of the story, as I do with Moby-Dick, or The Whale, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Anna Karenina, all books I’ve (embarrassingly) never read but still know an awful lot about.
A second way you know it’s a classic is that the plot has been polished down to a sentence or two—man seeks vengeance against a whale; a society woman has an affair with tragic results. Time smoothens the plot down like water over craggy rocks, the central conflict simple to understand and, more importantly, easy to remember.
And finally, a classic has to have an indelible lead, one with whom we deeply identify, with prominent character defects: Becky Sharp’s cravenness, Marlow’s obsessiveness, Gatsby’s ambition, Othello’s ruthlessness, Holden Caufield’s cynicism, Madame Bovary’s boredom, and Elizabeth Bennet’s well, pride. The mere mention of updating their stories and a world unfurls; a new path shows itself, their chief descriptors easily transferred into a modern realm.
These are the old classics, some of which have already invited many retellings. Here are a few examples of modern books that tick all three boxes, that one day will be ripe for their own retellings, this time, perhaps, with a feminine twist.
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