'Nature had come into her own again and, little by little, in her stealthy, insidious way had encroached upon the drive with long, tenacious fingers. The woods, always a menace in the past, had triumphed in the end. They crowded, dark and uncontrolled, to the borders of the drive.'

It is worth spending time on this passage because it holds the key to the mood of the novel, and it is typical of the description that follows in this chapter. Just as Rebecca is a character who never appears alive in the novel, the nature that fills the grounds of Manderley is a character that never speaks.

Nature is personified. It is 'she', and she appears to have a will and a mind of her own. The adjectives are those that we would use to describe the actions and attitudes of a person: 'stealthy', 'insidious'. Nature is given the body parts of a person: 'long, tenacious fingers'. Even the woods seem like a moral force that is capable of good and evil: 'always a menace in the past'.

This is a world of sly cleverness, gradual sneaky evil and bad influences that seem to creep up on you before you realise what is happening. You can never spot the exact moment when a plant is growing, yet sure enough it gets bigger and bigger. No wonder Mrs Danvers likes Manderley so much. These are exactly her characteristics. She is always plotting, always waiting for the right moment to act. She sneaks around the house hatching plots against Mrs de Winter, who never really knows what the evil housekeeper is up to.

So we can see why Mrs de Winter will never be the mistress of Manderley, and why she can never be happy there. She is a mild, timid and shy woman. She is dwarfed by the landscape of Manderley.

She is intimidated by it in the same way as she is bullied by Mrs Danvers. She wants a quiet, simple life. She is happiest when curled up in front of the fire, cuddled warmly to her husband.

Manderley is nature in its wild, fertile and productive state. It is like a wild child that needs the firm hand of a parent to tame it and keep it under control. Rebecca could achieve that; she herself was wild and productive with a rich imagination. She could cope with the grand scale of nature at Manderley. Mrs de Winter could not:

'No hand had checked their progress, and they had gone native now, rearing to monstrous heights without a bloom, black and ugly as the nameless parasites that grew beside them.'

This huge, wild profusion of growth also suited Rebecca's personality because of her sexuality. She took many lovers. She was a passionate, sexy woman with energy and strong feelings. This landscape of luscious growth and reproduction was exactly the right environment for her, and exactly the wrong environment for the reserved, dry figure of Mrs de Winter.

We later learn that Rebecca entertained her lovers in the hut on the beach. Long before we learn that, we are shown that Mrs de Winter can barely cope with the atmosphere and passion of the surroundings:

'And you came out of the valley, heady and rather dazed, to the hard white shingle of the beach and the still water.'

Mrs de Winter finds a kind of happiness with Max at the end of the book.

They live in hotels on the continent of Europe and lead a dull, stale life devoid of excitement that suits her. The wild excitement of nature at Manderley was always going to be too much for her.

It is just another sign of the distance between her character and that of Manderley's true soulmate and

mistress: Rebecca.