The story of a shy young bride haunted by the spectre of her older husband’s first wife, Daphne du Maurier’s 1938 masterpiece opens with the immortal line: “Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again.”
Manderley is the ancestral Cornish home of widower Maxim de Winter, whom our nameless narrator first meets in Monte Carlo, where she is employed as a ladies’ companion. A brief courtship and marriage follow, with the couple returning to Manderley after their honeymoon. But the flinty, gaslighting housekeeper Mrs Danvers hasn’t got over the death of Rebecca, her last mistress, killed in a sailing accident a year earlier, and so she resolves to make the second Mrs de Winter’s life a misery. She does this by undermining and humiliating her in front of the servants, and reminding her of her predecessor’s effervescence, beauty and ability to run a home.
