Rebecca

Rebecca is a novel by the English writer Daphne du Maurier, first published in 1938. Narrated by an unnamed young woman who becomes the second wife of the wealthy widower Maxim de Winter after a brief courtship in Monte Carlo, the story follows her return with him to Manderley, his grand Cornish estate, where she finds herself perpetually overshadowed by the memory of his first wife, the beautiful and seemingly perfect Rebecca, who drowned the previous year. The narrator's insecurity is deepened by the estate's forbidding housekeeper, Mrs. Danvers, who remains fiercely devoted to Rebecca's memory and subtly torments her successor, until the discovery of Rebecca's sunken boat, with her body still inside, forces Maxim to confess that their marriage had in fact been a loveless sham built on Rebecca's own cruelty and infidelity, and that he had killed her in a moment of rage before disguising her death as a boating accident. As an inquest, a blackmail attempt by Rebecca's cousin, and revelations about her final illness threaten to expose the truth, the couple's fate is finally overtaken when Manderley itself burns to the ground. Opening with the narrator's famous remembered line, Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again, the novel was an immediate bestseller, won the first National Book Award for favorite novel of 1938 as voted by American booksellers, and has never gone out of print, its atmosphere of gothic suspense and its psychologically unstable narrator establishing a lasting influence on the genre of romantic suspense fiction.