Rebecca— Historical Context & Author Background
Author: Daphne du Maurier · Published 1938· Era: Modernist / Gothic·380 pages
Themes explored: identity, obsession, class, jealousy, memory, gender, secrets, power
About Daphne du Maurier
Daphne du Maurier (1907–1989) was born into a distinguished creative family — her father Gerald du Maurier was the most celebrated actor-manager of his era. She grew up between London and Cornwall, and Cornwall's landscape — its cliffs, its coves, its enclosed, secretive beauty — is inseparable from everything she wrote. She was bisexual, though she used the code term 'the boy in the box' for the part of herself she could not publicly acknowledge. She was famously uncomfortable with social performance, with the demands of being a public figure, with 'femininity' as a role. She married the soldier 'Boy' Browning and wrote Rebecca while managing the anxiety of his absence and her own sense of personal inadequacy. The novel is, among other things, a displaced autobiography of her fear that she was not enough.
Life → Text Connections
How Daphne du Maurier's real experiences shaped specific elements of Rebecca.
Du Maurier's intense attachment to Menabilly, a Cornish house she could not afford to buy, which she eventually leased and lived in for 26 years
Manderley: a house so intensely imagined it functions as the novel's true protagonist
The narrator's obsession with Manderley mirrors du Maurier's own. The house as object of longing — beautiful, inaccessible, defining — is autobiographical.
Du Maurier's awareness of her husband's previous serious relationship — the 'Jan Ricardo' letters — which she discovered before their marriage
The narrator's overwhelming anxiety about Rebecca as the perfect predecessor she can never match
The novel's psychological core — the second wife's insecurity in the shadow of the first — was lived experience.
Du Maurier's discomfort with her own public role as 'beautiful authoress' — a performance she found exhausting and inauthentic
Rebecca as the perfect performer of femininity, the narrator as the woman who can't perform it, and Mrs. Danvers as the audience who sees through everything
Du Maurier was examining femininity as performance from the inside — with the particular bitterness of someone expected to excel at a performance she distrusted.
Her deep, arguably primary relationships with women throughout her life — particularly her intensity with friends like Gertrude Lawrence
Mrs. Danvers's love for Rebecca, described in terms of passionate devotion that exceed conventional employer-employee or even friendship categories
The most fully realized relationship in the novel is not the narrator-Maxim romance but Mrs. Danvers's love for Rebecca — and du Maurier brought personal knowledge to it.
Historical Era
Interwar England (1920s–1930s) — the great country house in decline
How the Era Shapes the Book
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 start by its fragility. Rebecca is partly an elegy for a class and a way of life that was disappearing, which gives the burning at the end an additional resonance: not just Mrs. Danvers's destruction of a shrine, but history's destruction of an entire social order.
Why Rebecca Matters Historically
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 runs from Victoria Holt through Phyllis Whitney to contemporary domestic suspense. Du Maurier filed a plagiarism lawsuit over a Brazilian novel, O Sucessor, with suspicious similarities, and won. The name 'Rebecca' became culturally associated with a particular kind of dangerous, captivating femininity.
- Established the template for the modern Gothic romance: plain heroine, dark mysterious hero, great house, secret that rewrites everything
- One of the first novels to make the absent character the most powerful presence in the narrative
- Pioneered the female Gothic as a genre in which the house itself is a psychological antagonist
- Demonstrated that popular commercial fiction and literary psychological complexity were not mutually exclusive
Rebecca has not been widely banned, but it has been challenged in some schools for sexual content (Rebecca's implied affairs), the protagonist's complicity in concealing a murder, and what some critics have read as a homophobic portrayal of Mrs. Danvers's devotion to Rebecca. Du Maurier herself rejected the 'lesbian' reading of the Mrs. Danvers character while acknowledging the intensity of the devotion she depicted.