Rebecca
Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again.
Why read it
“Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again.” A shy young woman marries a brooding widower and arrives at his grand English estate, only to find the house, the servants, and her husband still ruled by the memory of his glamorous first wife, Rebecca, who is everywhere and nowhere.
Du Maurier's gothic novel is narrated by a heroine so overshadowed she is never even named, as she tries to take her place at Manderley against the ghost of a woman she cannot compete with. It is a study of jealousy, class, and the slow uncovering of what really happened to Rebecca, building to a secret that upends everything the narrator, and the reader, assumed.
Published in 1938, written while du Maurier was in Egypt and homesick, drawing on her own jealousy over her husband's former fiancee and on a Cornish estate she loved called Menabilly. A bestseller from the start, it has never gone out of print and was adapted by Alfred Hitchcock into the 1940 film that won the Best Picture Oscar.
- 01
The unnamed narrator
Withholding the heroine's name keeps her forever provisional, defined only against the dead woman she replaced.
- 02
Mrs. Danvers
The devoted housekeeper who worships Rebecca turns the house into a psychological trap for the new bride.
- 03
Manderley itself
The estate is a character, seductive and suffocating, whose fate frames the entire novel.
- 04
The turn
A midpoint revelation about Rebecca's true nature flips the reader's sympathies and the book's genre.
Mrs. Danvers leading the narrator through Rebecca's preserved bedroom, stroking the dead woman's furs and lingerie, is one of the great scenes of gothic menace.
The costume ball, where the innocent narrator is manipulated into wearing a gown that recreates a devastating past humiliation, is the novel's cruelest pivot.
