Rebecca is a 1938 Gothic novel by the English author Daphne du Maurier. It 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.
A bestseller which has never gone out of print, Rebecca sold 2.8 million copies between its publication in 1938 and 1965. It has been adapted numerous times for stage and screen, including a 1939 play by du Maurier herself, the film Rebecca (1940), directed by Alfred Hitchcock, which won the Academy Award for Best Picture, and the 2020 remake directed by Ben Wheatley for Netflix. The story has been adapted as a musical.
The novel is remembered especially for the character of Mrs. Danvers, the West Country estate Manderley, which du Maurier's editor noted "is as much an atmosphere as a tangible erection of stones and mortar", and its opening line: "Last night, I dreamt I went to Manderley again."
Synopsis In a scene-setting introduction, the unnamed narrator dreams of her husband's estate, Manderley, lamenting that she cannot return. Time has passed since its destruction, during which the couple have settled into "a quiet peace" in small Mediterranean hotels.
In her early twenties, the narrator works as a companion to a rich American woman, Mrs. Van Hopper, who is on holiday in Monte Carlo. They meet the wealthy 42-year-old Maximilian de Winter. He is a widower whose wife, Rebecca, drowned in a sailing accident a year earlier. After a fortnight of courtship, she becomes the second Mrs. de Winter and accompanies him to Manderley, his estate in Cornwall, where she is introduced to Mrs Danvers, housekeeper and former lady's maid to Rebecca.
Mrs Danvers continually attempts to undermine the narrator psychologically, suggesting to her that she will never attain the beauty and elegance her predecessor possessed. She shows the narrator the west wing of the house, which overlooks the sea. The west wing was formerly Rebecca's bedroom, which she has preserved as a shrine to her late mistress. When the narrator makes small requests, Mrs Danvers and the other staff describe how Rebecca ran Manderley when she was alive. Cowed by Mrs Danvers' imposing manner and the other members of West Country society's unwavering reverence for Rebecca, the narrator becomes isolated.
The narrator is soon convinced that Maxim regrets his impetuous decision to marry her, and that he is still deeply in love with the seemingly perfect Rebecca. At the pressing of neighbours, Manderley hosts a costume ball, a custom Rebecca had instated. Mrs Danvers suggests the narrator wears a replica of the dress from a portrait of one of the house's former inhabitants. When the narrator enters the hall and Maxim sees the dress, he angrily orders her to change; Rebecca had worn the same costume to much acclaim shortly before her death.
When confronted by the narrator, Mrs Danvers encourages her to kill herself by jumping from Rebecca's bedroom window. However, she is interrupted by the disturbance caused by a nearby shipwreck. A diver investigating the wrecked ship's hull condition also discovers the remains of Rebecca's sailing boat, with her decomposed body still on board, despite Maxim having identified another body that had washed ashore two months after Rebecca's death.
This discovery causes Maxim to confess to the narrator that his marriage to Rebecca was a sham. Rebecca, Maxim reveals, was a cruel and selfish woman who took many lovers while manipulating everyone around her into believing her to be the perfect wife and a paragon of virtue. On the night of her death, she taunted Maxim with the prospect of having another man's child, which she would raise under the pretence that it was Maxim's, and he would be unable to prove otherwise. Enraged, Maxim shot and killed Rebecca. He then disposed of her body by placing it in her boat and sinking it at sea. The narrator is relieved to hear that Maxim has always loved her and never Rebecca.
Rebecca's boat is raised, and it is discovered to have been deliberately sunk. An inquest brings a verdict of suicide. However, Rebecca's first cousin and lover, Jack Favell, attempts to blackmail Maxim, claiming she could not have intended suicide based on a note she sent to him the night she died. It is revealed that Rebecca had had an appointment with a doctor in London shortly before her death, which the narrator suspects was to confirm a pregnancy. When the doctor is found, he reveals that Rebecca had cancer and would have died within a few months. Furthermore, due to the malformation of her uterus, she could never have been pregnant. Maxim assumes that Rebecca, knowing that she would die, manipulated him into killing her quickly. Mrs Danvers had said after the inquiry that Rebecca feared nothing except dying a lingering death.
On hearing that Mrs Danvers has abruptly disappeared from Manderley, Maxim feels a great sense of foreboding and insists on driving through the night to return home. Before they come in sight of the house, it is clear from a glow on the horizon and wind-borne ashes that it is ablaze.
Characters Principal characters The Narrator/the Second Mrs de Winter: A timid, naïve, middle-class woman in her early twenties, who enjoys sketching. Neither the narrator's first nor maiden name is revealed. She is referred to as "my wife", "Mrs de Winter", "my dear", and so on. The one time she is introduced with a name is during a fancy dress ball, in which she dresses as a de Winter ancestor and is introduced as "Caroline de Winter", although this is clearly not her own name. She signs her name as "Mrs M. de Winter", using Maxim's initial. Early in the novel she receives a letter and remarks that her name was correctly spelled, which is "an unusual thing," suggesting her name is uncommon, foreign or complex. While courting her, Maxim compliments her on her "lovely and unusual name". Initially timid, she gains a sense of confidence over the course of the novel. Maximilian "Maxim" de Winter: The reserved, unemotional owner of Manderley. He marries his new wife after a brief courtship, yet displays little affection toward her after the marriage. Emotionally scarred by his traumatic marriage to Rebecca, his distance toward his new wife causes her to fear he regrets his marriage to her and is still haunted by Rebecca's death. Maxim killed Rebecca after she taunted him with the prospect of raising an illegitimate child as Maxim's heir. Mrs Danvers: The cold, overbearing housekeeper of Manderley. Danvers was Rebecca's family maid when she was a child and has lived with her for years. She is obsessed with Rebecca and preserving Rebecca's memory. She resents the new Mrs de Winter, convinced she is trying to "take Rebecca's place", and continually psychologically torments her. She tries to undermine the new Mrs de Winter, but her efforts fail. Rebecca de Winter: The unseen, deceased title character, who has been dead for less than a year. A famous beauty, and on the surface a devoted wife and perfect hostess, Rebecca was actually unfaithful to her husband Maxim. Her lingering presence overwhelms Manderley, dominating the visitors, the staff and the new Mrs de Winter.
Development In 1937, Daphne du Maurier signed a three-book deal with Victor Gollancz and accepted an advance of £1,000.. A 2008 article in The Daily Telegraph indicates she had been toying with the theme of jealousy for the five years since her marriage in 1932. She started "sluggishly" and wrote a desperate apology to Gollancz: "The first 15,000 words I tore up in disgust and this literary miscarriage has cast me down rather."
Her husband, Tommy "Boy" Browning, was Lieutenant Colonel of the Grenadier Guards and they were posted to Alexandria, Egypt, with the Second Battalion, leaving Britain on 30 July 1937. Gollancz expected her manuscript on their return to Britain in December but she wrote that she was "ashamed to tell you that progress is slow on the new novel...There is little likelihood of my bringing back a finished manuscript in December."
On returning to Britain in December 1937, du Maurier decided to spend Christmas away from her family to write the book and she successfully delivered it to her publisher less than four months later. Du Maurier described the plot as "a sinister tale about a woman who marries a widower....Psychological and rather macabre."
Derivation and inspiration Some commentators have noted parallels with Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre. Another of du Maurier's works, Jamaica Inn, is also linked to one of the Brontë sisters' works, Emily's Wuthering Heights.
While du Maurier "categorised Rebecca as a study in jealousy ... she admitted its origins in her own life to few." Her husband had been previously engaged to Jan Ricardo, a glamorous dark-haired figure. Du Maurier was apparently haunted by the suspicion that Browning remained attracted to Ricardo. In The Rebecca Notebook of 1981, du Maurier recalled the novel's gestation: "Seeds began to drop. A beautiful home ... a first wife ... jealousy, a wreck, perhaps at sea, near to the house ... But something terrible would have to happen, I did not know what..." In her preliminary notes for the novel, she wrote: "I want to build up the character of the first [wife] in the mind of the second...until wife 2 is haunted day and night...a tragedy is looming very close and CRASH! BANG! something happens."
Like Rebecca and Maximilian de Winter, du Maurier and her husband were not faithful to one another. Jan Ricardo eventually died by suicide during the Second World War, throwing herself under a train.
Du Maurier commented publicly in her lifetime that the book was based on her own memories of Menabilly and Cornwall, as well as her relationship with her father. The depictions of Manderly may have been influenced by du Maurier's childhood visits to Milton Hall, Cambridgeshire (then in Northamptonshire) home of the Wentworth-Fitzwilliam family.
Plagiarism allegations Shortly after Rebecca was published in Brazil, critic Álvaro Lins pointed out many resemblances between du Maurier's book and the work of Brazilian writer Carolina Nabuco. Nabuco's A Sucessora (The Successor), published in 1934, has a main plot similar to Rebecca, for example a young woman marrying a widower and the strange presence of the first wife—plot features also shared with the far older Jane Eyre.. Nina Auerbach alleged in her book Daphne du Maurier, Haunted Heiress, that du Maurier read the English version of the Brazilian book when the first drafts were sent to the same publisher as hers in order to be published in England, and based her famous best-seller on it.
Immediately following a 1941 article in The New York Times Book Review highlighting the two novels' many similarities, du Maurier issued a rebuttal in a letter to the editor. According to Nabuco's autobiography, Eight Decades, she (Nabuco) refused to sign an agreement brought to her by a United Artists' representative in which she would concede that the similarities between her book and the movie were mere coincidence.. A further, ironic complication in Nabuco's allegations is the similarity between her novel and the novel Encarnação, written by José de Alencar, one of Brazil's most celebrated novelists of the nineteenth century, and published posthumously in 1893.
In 1944, according to The Hollywood Reporter, du Maurier, her U.S. publishers Doubleday and United Artists, distributors of the film adaptation, were sued for plagiarism by Edwina Levin MacDonald who alleged that du Maurier had copied her 1927 novel Blind Windows, and sought an undisclosed amount of accounting and damages.The Hollywood Reporter, 13 January 1944 The complaint was eventually dismissed on 14 January 1948.The Fresno Bee Republican, 17 January 1948 – see e.g. here
Publishing history