Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier: A Full Summary and Guide
What Rebecca is about
Published in 1938, Rebecca is a Gothic novel by the English writer Daphne du Maurier. It is told by a young woman whose name the reader never learns. In her early twenties she is working as a paid companion to a rich American, Mrs Van Hopper, who is holidaying in Monte Carlo. There she meets Maximilian de Winter, a wealthy widower of forty-two. His wife, Rebecca, drowned in a sailing accident a year earlier.
The courtship lasts a fortnight. The narrator becomes the second Mrs de Winter and travels with Maxim to Manderley, his estate in Cornwall. What should be the beginning of a new life turns into something closer to a haunting. The dead woman's taste still governs the rooms, the menus and the household routine. The staff remember how Rebecca did things. The neighbours remember how beautiful she was. The new wife, young and socially unsure, cannot compete with a memory.
The book opens with one of the most quoted first lines in English fiction: "Last night, I dreamt I went to Manderley again." That sentence tells you the story is being recalled from a distance, after the fact, by a narrator who can no longer go back. The couple, we learn early, now live quietly in small Mediterranean hotels. Why they cannot return is the question the novel spends its length answering.
The main characters
The narrator is the novel's engine. She is nameless throughout, which is not a trick so much as the point. She is defined by other people, first as a companion, then as the second Mrs de Winter. She is shy, observant and prone to imagining the worst, and much of the suspense comes from the gap between what she assumes and what is actually true.
Maxim de Winter is older, wealthy and withdrawn. He is courteous one moment and coldly angry the next, and the narrator reads his moods as grief for Rebecca. Whether she is reading them correctly is the hinge of the book.
Mrs Danvers, the housekeeper, is the character readers remember. She was Rebecca's lady's maid before she was the housekeeper at Manderley, and her loyalty did not end with her mistress's death. She keeps Rebecca's bedroom in the west wing, overlooking the sea, as a shrine. She works steadily at the new wife's confidence, suggesting she will never match her predecessor's beauty or elegance. Her cruelty is quiet and domestic, delivered in the language of service.
Rebecca herself never appears. She is assembled entirely from other people's accounts, which is precisely what makes her so powerful. Jack Favell, her cousin, turns up later and complicates the picture. And Manderley is close to being a character in its own right. Du Maurier's editor described it as "as much an atmosphere as a tangible erection of stones and mortar".
The themes
Identity runs through everything. The narrator has no name, no money and no social standing of her own, and she spends the novel trying to work out who she is supposed to be in a house built around somebody else. The costume ball sequence is the sharpest expression of this. Mrs Danvers suggests she copy a dress from a portrait of a former inhabitant of the house, and the result is humiliation rather than triumph.
Class sits underneath the romance. The narrator arrives as an employee and is suddenly expected to command a large staff who liked the old mistress better. Every small request she makes is met with an account of how Rebecca used to do it. The servants hold real power here, and she knows it.
Death and madness are the Gothic engine. The book is obsessed with a corpse that will not stay settled, with a woman who preserves a dead woman's bedroom unchanged, and with the point at which grief curdles into obsession. Mrs Danvers' devotion eventually turns openly dangerous, urging the narrator towards the window of Rebecca's room.
How it ends (spoilers)
A shipwreck brings a diver to the bay, and he finds the sunken hull of Rebecca's boat with her body still inside. Maxim had already identified a different body washed ashore two months after her death. Forced into the open, he confesses that the marriage was a sham. Rebecca was cruel and manipulative, took many lovers, and played the perfect wife in public. On the night she died she taunted him with the prospect of raising another man's child as his heir. He shot her, put her in the boat and sank it.
The inquest returns a verdict of suicide, since the boat was clearly scuttled on purpose. Favell tries blackmail, citing a note Rebecca sent him that night. The trail leads to a London doctor, who reveals that Rebecca had cancer and only months to live, and that a malformed uterus meant she could never have been pregnant at all. Maxim concludes she goaded him into killing her to spare herself a slow death. Mrs Danvers had already said Rebecca feared nothing but dying by inches.
Mrs Danvers then vanishes from Manderley. Maxim drives through the night, and before the house comes into view the sky is glowing and ash is blowing on the wind.
Why it still matters
The book has never been out of print and sold 2.8 million copies between 1938 and 1965. Alfred Hitchcock's 1940 film won the Academy Award for Best Picture, du Maurier wrote her own stage version in 1939, there has been a musical, and Ben Wheatley directed a Netflix remake in 2020. It suits readers who want suspense built from atmosphere and social unease rather than action, and anyone interested in unreliable narration or in how a house can hold a reputation hostage.
