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Rebecca
Daphne du Maurier (1938) · 380pages · Modernist / Gothic · 7 AP appearances
Summary
A shy, unnamed young woman marries the brooding widower Maxim de Winter and moves into Manderley, his vast English estate. There she is haunted by the memory of Rebecca, Maxim's first wife — kept alive by the fanatically devoted housekeeper Mrs. Danvers. As the narrator struggles to find her place, she gradually uncovers the truth: Rebecca was not the perfect woman everyone believed, and Maxim did not love her. He killed her. The narrator must decide whether to protect him — and whether love built on a dark secret can survive.
Why It Matters
Rebecca was the bestselling novel in Britain in 1938 and the United States in 1939. It has never gone out of print. Alfred Hitchcock's 1940 film adaptation won the Academy Award for Best Picture. The novel essentially invented the modern 'psychological Gothic romance' genre — the template that ru...
Themes & Motifs
Diction & Style
Register: Formal and interior — elevated descriptive prose alternating with anxious, self-interrupting first-person narration
Narrator: Unnamed, retrospective, deeply unreliable by virtue of self-distortion rather than deliberate deception. The narrator...
Figurative Language: High, with particular concentration in landscape description. Du Maurier's landscapes are always psychological
Historical Context
Interwar England (1920s–1930s) — the great country house in decline: Manderley is already an anachronism in 1938 — a fully staffed great house requires wealth and social stability that the interwar period was dissolving. The house's magnificence is shadowed from the...
Key Characters
Talking Points
- The narrator never receives a name in the novel. Du Maurier made this choice deliberately. What is the effect — and what would change if we knew her name?
- 'Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again.' What does the opening sentence establish before we know anything about character, plot, or setting?
- The narrator's response to Maxim's confession — relief rather than horror — is one of the most morally disorienting moments in the novel. Is her response believable? Is it sympathetic?
- Mrs. Danvers is sometimes described as the novel's most fully realized character. What does she want? Can you justify her actions from her own perspective?
- Rebecca never appears in the novel. How does du Maurier make her the dominant presence in a book she never enters?
Notable Quotes
“Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again.”
“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.”
“I am a person who finds it difficult to look people in the eyes, and I saw him only in profile at first.”
Why Read This
Because Rebecca does something almost no other novel on the syllabus does: it makes you fall for the same deception the narrator falls for. You spend two hundred pages believing Maxim loved Rebecca, building your own image of a perfect dead woman ...