The Woman in the Water by Henrietta McKervey – A Book Recommendation
Here’s a question for the many thousands of you who love Daphne du Maurier’s novel, Rebecca.
Have you ever wondered who the woman was that Maxim identified as his wife, forty miles up the coast from Manderley, about two months after she had disappeared? All we know is that Maxim identified her as Rebecca, and that she was laid to rest in the de Winter family crypt on the Manderley estate.
A year later, Rebecca’s body was discovered lying on the floor of the cabin of the sunken Je Reviens by a diver investigating a nearby wreck. The real Rebecca’s body was, of course, interned in the family crypt.
But we never know what happened to the other body. She disappears from the story; there is no further mention of her.
So who was she, and how did she come to be identified by Maxim?
Henrietta McKervey is the author of such acclaimed novels as What Becomes of Us, Violet Hill and A Talented Man. She is a huge fan of the novel Rebecca and has long pondered about what happened to that poor, disinterred woman, so she decided to write her story.
Her new novel, The Woman in the Water, was published by Hachette Books Ireland on 5th March this year. It is a dark yet glamorous tale set in London, Cornwall, and New York in the 1930s. Of course, at this stage, there is no connection between the characters in this story and those in Rebecca, so we are thrown into an entirely new world of Lady Eleanor Nicholson and her childhood friend Pearl.
The story takes you in many directions with a cast of some decidedly dubious characters as the plot twists and turns. It leaves you unsure who the woman in the water is until very late in the book, and even then, in the final pages, it takes another turn and surprises you some more.
If you want to know who that lost soul in the crypt at Manderley was, you need to read The Woman in the Water.
You’ll be glad you did…
Ann Willmore, April 2026.