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Rebecca is a 1938 Gothic novel by the English author Daphne du Maurier. The novel depicts an unnamed young woman who impetuously marries a wealthy widower, before discovering that both he and his household are haunted by the memory of his late first wife, the title character.
- Du Maurier, Daphne, Dame
- 1938
Rebecca. Daphne du Maurier. 4.24. 650,148 ratings42,468 reviews. "Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again..." Ancient, beautiful Manderley, between the rose garden and the sea, is the county's showpiece. Rebecca made it so - even a year after her death, Rebecca's influence still rules there.
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Rebecca, Gothic suspense novel by Daphne du Maurier, published in 1938. Widely considered a classic, it is a psychological thriller about a young woman who becomes obsessed with her husband’s first wife.
The story is set evocatively in the wilds of Cornwall, in a large country house called Manderley. One of du Maurier’s intriguing devices is her refusal to name her heroine, the first-person narrator, known only as the second Mrs. de Winter. The novel opens with her famously saying, “Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again.” Much of the story is then told in flashback. A shy, awkward young woman, she is in Monte-Carlo, working for an elderly socialite, when she meets Maximilian (Maxim) de Winter. He is a wealthy widower whose wife, Rebecca, drowned in a sailboat accident. After a whirlwind courtship, the young woman and Maxim marry and later settle at Manderley. The narrator begins to feel progressively inferior to Rebecca, despite receiving compliments from various people. To the second Mrs. de Winter, Rebecca personifies glamour and gaiety, and she does not think that she can compete with this dead paragon to win Maxim’s love. Mrs. Danvers, the sinister housekeeper, especially wounds the narrator by constantly mentioning how much Maxim had loved, and would always love, Rebecca.
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Suspense builds as the narrator grows both increasingly obsessed with the beautiful first wife and insecure in her marriage. At the annual costume ball at Manderley, the second Mrs. de Winter wears a costume at the encouragement of Mrs. Danvers, not realizing it was similar to one worn by Rebecca shortly before her death. The outfit upsets Maxim, who orders her to change. The narrator later confronts Mrs. Danvers, who says that Maxim does not want her and encourages her to jump out the second-floor window. However, just then rockets are set off as a ship strikes a reef in the nearby bay, and the two women part. Divers soon discover a sunken sailing boat that contains Rebecca’s body. Maxim then reveals the truth to his second wife—he was not in love with Rebecca. She was cruel and manipulative, and soon after their wedding she began having numerous affairs. Fearful of scandal, Maxim agreed to her offer: she would outwardly appear as the perfect wife if he allowed her to live privately as she pleased. However, on the night of her death, she had informed her husband that she was pregnant and that the father was one of her lovers. In a fit of anger, Maxim shot Rebecca and put her body in a sailboat that he then sank. (A body had been found weeks after Rebecca’s disappearance, and Maxim had identified it as being hers.)
Among du Maurier’s favourite writers were the Brontë sisters (Emily Charlotte, and Anne), and the plot and pace of Rebecca are reminiscent of Jane Eyre. However, with Rebecca, many believed that du Maurier had found her own voice as an author. She infused the melodramatic tale with great psychological insight and presented a story of jealousy that ...
Rebecca's narrative takes the form of a flashback. The heroine, who remains nameless, lives in Europe with her husband, Maxim de Winter, traveling from hotel to hotel, harboring memories of a beautiful home called Manderley, which, we learn, has been destroyed by fire.
- Du Maurier, Daphne, Dame
- 1938
One Gothic novel to which Rebecca explicitly alludes is Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre (1847). Much like the narrator of Rebecca , Jane Eyre, the titular heroine, falls in love with Rochester, the shadowy master of Thornfield Hall, in spite of Rochester’s conflicted relationship with his previous wife, Bertha (who, much like Mrs. Danvers in ...
Chapter 1. The novel is narrated by an unnamed woman recalling past events in her life. Throughout the course of the book, the narrator remembers the time she spent at Manderley, a large, handsome English estate, while married to Maxim de Winter.
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Yet Rebecca is more than a reflection of its era's literary fads: the book is simultaneously an insightful psychological novel. Its heroine, symbolically nameless, comes to Manderley and finds herself competing with the ghost of her husband's dead wife.
