Rebacca haunted Ms de Winter and haunted me all along. Indeed it is a novel that once you start you cannot put down.I made a schedule of reading 20 pages or so per day, so that I could have an enjoyable pastime in the vacation. Yet I know right from the beginning that the schedule would never be sticked to. Soon the book turned out to be a sweet burden. Twenty pages the first day, as I was introduced to the milieu and the main characters; forty pages the second, as I acquainted myself with the narrator and developed deep empathy for her. The further I went down chapeter after chapter, the more I found its fanscination irresistable. The second half of the book was finished in one day. When I finally closed the book at 2 a.m. this morning, it felt as if I had been living in Manderley with the de Winters, and had just survived the crisis. But the ending is not in a fairytale fashion that caters to readers seeking for a happy love story that could send them to sound sleep. The ending rings more like a start of the real tragedy, dismal and foreboding as ever. The author assigns a sombre consequence to every triumph and euphoria, and one could tell with certainty that this time, again, 'something was wrong'. With deliberate cruelty and irony, it reveals the bitter truth about life: happiness is but an illusion and a never fulfilled quest. That sort of intuititive feeling lingers on me long after I closed the book. Rebecca casts spells on me with its brilliantly designed plot, which made it the bestseller. But a mere melodrama does not hover like this, making you think and wonder what is beneath the breathtaking plot, and keep asking 'what is it?' 
By reading Rebecca I have lived other person's life, a life that I would never lived in my own. It might be a childish fancy, and a human inherence as well, to be some one else. But when you are drawn back from the fiction, you feel deeply satisfied and rewarded. Because it enriches your own life. When I read Rebecca, I feel it grows in me.