Rebecca

Rebecca is a novel by the British writer Daphne du Maurier, published in 1938. It is told in the first person by a young woman whose name the reader is never given, looking back at the events of the story from some distance.

The narrator meets Maxim de Winter, a wealthy widower, while she is working as a paid companion in Monte Carlo. After a short courtship they marry, and she goes back with him to Manderley, his house on the Cornish coast, where she is much younger than he is and unsure of the part she is meant to play.

At Manderley nothing has been changed since Maxim's first wife, Rebecca, died. The housekeeper, Mrs Danvers, keeps Rebecca's rooms exactly as they were and makes certain that the new wife understands she is not her equal, so that the house and everyone in it seem to belong to a woman who is gone.

Du Maurier tells the story from the position of the second wife, so the reader sees Manderley through a narrator who is both excluded from it and half in awe of her predecessor. It is a standalone novel, and it has been filmed several times, including by Alfred Hitchcock in 1940.