the inscription 'Max from Rebecca'

The inscription 'Max from Rebecca' is a handwritten dedication on the flyleaf of a well-worn volume of poetry that Maxim de Winter keeps in the pocket of his car. It is the first concrete object through which the second Mrs de Winter encounters the ghost of her predecessor, and it becomes a talisman of Rebecca's confident, possessive intimacy with Maxim—a possession the narrator feels she can never match.

Appearance and Discovery

The narrator discovers the book of poems on the afternoon of her first long drive with Maxim, when she finds it in the pocket of his car and takes it with her to the hotel lounge. The volume is well thumbed, falling open automatically at a much-frequented page—the opening of Francis Thompson's "The Hound of Heaven"—and when she turns to the title-page she reads the dedication: "Max—from Rebecca. 17 May", written in a curious slanting hand. A little blob of ink mars the white page opposite, as though the writer, in impatience, had shaken her pen to make the ink flow freely, and when it bubbled through the nib it came a little thick, so that the name Rebecca stands out black and strong, the tall and sloping R dwarfing the other letters.

The Narrator's Reaction and the Burning

The inscription immediately triggers a painful imaginative identification. The narrator pictures Rebecca placing the book among Maxim's other presents on the breakfast table, laughing with him as he tore off the paper and string, leaning perhaps over his shoulder while he read. She reflects that "Max" was Rebecca's choice, the word her possession, written with so great a confidence on the flyleaf—that bold, slanting hand stabbing the white paper, the symbol of herself, so certain, so assured. The narrator contrasts this with her own formal use of "Maxim," feeling that the familiar, gay, easy name belongs to Rebecca alone. Later, on the morning after Maxim's proposal, when the narrator is alone in her hotel bedroom waiting for Mrs Van Hopper to be told the news, the demon of jealousy prompts her to open the book again. She takes her nail scissors from the dressing-case and cuts the page right out of the book, leaving no jagged edges, so that the book looks white and clean when the page is gone. Then she tears the page into many little fragments, sets fire to them in the waste-paper basket, and watches the flame curl the edges, making the slanting writing impossible to distinguish. The letter R is the last to go, twisting in the flame, curling outwards for a moment, becoming larger than ever, then crumpling into feathery dust. She washes her hands in the basin and feels better, much better, with the clean new feeling that one has when the calendar is hung on the wall at the beginning of the year.

Thematic Significance

The inscription functions as a compressed emblem of the novel's central conflict: the second Mrs de Winter's struggle against the overwhelming, undead presence of Rebecca. The act of burning the page is the narrator's first attempt to destroy Rebecca's hold on Maxim—a private, almost superstitious ritual of exorcism that she performs in secret, looking over her shoulder like a criminal. Yet the gesture is also deeply ironic: the narrator destroys only a physical page, not the memory or the relationship it represents, and the book itself remains in her possession, a silent witness. The inscription's survival in the narrative—it is never mentioned again after the burning—underscores the futility of trying to erase the past by destroying its tokens. The dedication also foreshadows the novel's later revelations: the confident, assertive hand that wrote "Max from Rebecca" belongs to a woman who, as Maxim eventually confesses, was vicious, damnable, and rotten through and through, and whose marriage to him was a farce from the very first. The inscription thus becomes a site of radical ambiguity—at once a symbol of Rebecca's power and, retrospectively, of the lie that power sustained.