Rebecca

The direct ancestor — plain heroine, dark hero, great house, wife-secret. Rebecca revises and darkens the template by making the heroine morally compromised where Jane is entirely pure.

Obsession from beyond the grave, Gothic landscape as psychological projection, love that destroys rather than completes. Du Maurier absorbed both Brontë sisters into Rebecca.

The haunting that may be internal. James's novella raises, without answering, whether the ghosts are real or the narrator's construction. Du Maurier does the same — but answers the question at the cost of some mystery.

The missing woman whose myth is more powerful than her reality; the husband suspected of murder; the performance of perfect femininity as a weapon. Flynn acknowledged du Maurier as a foundational influence.

Postwar English Gothic — the great house in decline, the class outsider who cannot belong to it, a haunting that may be psychological projection. The closest contemporary heir to Rebecca's specific concerns.

Du Maurier's own variation on Rebecca's themes — a narrator obsessed with an absent woman, a great house, a mystery of guilt or innocence that the novel refuses to resolve.