Rebecca
SynopsisPlot
In Monte Carlo, our heroine is swept off her feet by the dashing widower Maxim de Winter and his sudden proposal of marriage. Orphaned and working as a lady’s maid, she can barely believe her luck. It is only when they arrive at Manderley, her husband’s cavernous estate on the Cornish coast, that she realizes how vast a shadow his late wife, Rebecca, will cast over their lives—introducing a lingering evil that threatens to destroy their love from beyond the grave.
Story
About this book
A young, unnamed narrator meets the wealthy widower Maxim de Winter while working as a companion to an older woman in Monte Carlo. His proposal comes quickly, and the two marry before she has had time to learn much about his past. When she arrives at Manderley, his grand estate on the coast of Cornwall, she finds that the memory of his first wife, Rebecca, saturates every room and routine of the household.
The housekeeper, Mrs. Danvers, maintains Rebecca's private rooms in perfect order, as though their former occupant might return at any moment. The new Mrs. de Winter, inexperienced and uncertain of her place, struggles against a presence she can feel but never met. Daphne du Maurier sets the story's tension between the living and the remembered, between a marriage that is just beginning and one that refuses to end. Cornwall's isolated landscape, with its fog, cliffs, and sea, reinforces the atmosphere of confinement.
Published in 1938, Rebecca became one of du Maurier's most widely read novels. The book opens with its narrator looking back on Manderley from a distance, a structure that establishes from the first page that whatever happened there has already passed but still holds its grip.
