In 2020, Taylor Swift told us she read Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca, the 1938 bestseller about a young bride haunted by the memory of her husband’s glamorous first wife. Swift described how it inspired her while she was writing Tolerate It for her ninth studio album Evermore, which came out the same year.
The song was about trying hard to impress an older partner and going unappreciated. Swift explained that she’d identified with the book’s narrator, known only as Mrs de Winter (the successor of Maxim de Winter’s late first wife, Rebecca): “She’s trying so hard […] to impress him and he’s just tolerating her.”
