Characters

The speaker, Mrs. de Winter: The narrator's name is never revealed. She is referred to as "my wife", Mrs. de Winter, "my dear", etc., but her first and last name are never revealed by the author. The one time she is introduced with a name is during a fancy dress ball, in which she dresses as a de Winter ancestor and is introduced as "Caroline de Winter", however this is evidently not her own name. Early in the novel she receives a letter and remarks that her name was correctly spelled, which is "an unusual thing", suggesting her name is strange, foreign or complex. Whilst courting her, Maxim compliments her on her "lovely and unusual name."

Mrs. Danvers: The cold-hearted, overbearing housekeeper of Manderly. She is obsessed with Rebecca and preserving her memory, and resents the new Mrs. de Winter, convinced she is trying to "take Rebecca's place."

Maximilian (Maxim) De Winter: The reserved, unemotional owner of Manderly. He marries his new wife after a brief courtship, yet displays little affection toward her after the marriage. He eventually does reveal that he does love her, yet after several months of marriage.

Locations

The fictional Hôtel Côte d'Azur, Monte Carlo The fictional Manderley, a country estate which du Maurier's editor noted "is as much an atmosphere as a tangible erection of stones and mortar"

Development

"In 1937, Daphne du Maurier signed a three-book deal with Victor Gollancz" and accepted an advance of £1,000.A 2008 article in The Telegraph indicates she had been toying with the theme of jealousy for the five years since her marriage in 1932.She started "sluggishly" and wrote a desperate apology to Gollancz: 'The first 15,000 words I tore up in disgust and this literary miscarriage has cast me down rather...'"Her husband, Tommy Browning, was Lieutenant Colonel of the Grenadier Guards and they were posted to Alexandria, Eypt with the Second Battalion, leaving Britain on 30 July 1937.Gollancz expected her manuscript on their return to Britain in December but she wrote that she was "ashamed to tell you that progress is slow on the new novel, ... There is little likelihood of my bringing back a finished manuscript in December."On returning to Britain in December 1937, du Maurier decided to spend Christmas away from her family to write the book and she successfully delivered it to her publisher less than four months later.Du Maurier described it as "a sinister tale about a woman who marries a widower... Psychological and rather macabre."

Derivation and inspiration

Some commentators have noted parallels with Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre.Another of du Maurier's works, Jamaica Inn, is also linked to one of the Brontë sisters' works, Emily's Wuthering Heights. Du Maurier commented publicly in her lifetime that the book was based on her own memories of Menabilly and Cornwall, as well as her relationship with her father.While du Maurier "categorised Rebecca as a study in jealousy ... she admitted its origins in her own life to few."Her husband had been "engaged before – to glamorous, dark-haired Jan Ricardo. The suspicion that Tommy remained attracted to Ricardo haunted Daphne."In The Rebecca Notebook of 1981, du Maurier "'remembered' Rebecca's gestation ... "Seeds began to drop. A beautiful home... a first wife... jealousy, a wreck, perhaps at sea, near to the house... But something terrible would have to happen, I did not know what..."She wrote in her notes prior to writing: "I want to built up the character of the first [wife] in the mind of the second... until wife 2 is haunted day and night... a tragedy is looming very close and CRASH! BANG! something happens.""Du Maurier and her husband, "Tommy Browning, like Rebecca and Maximilian de Winter, were not faithful to one another." Subsequent to the novel's publication, "Jan Ricardo, tragically, died during the Second World War [she] threw herself under a train."

Childhood visits to Milton Hall, Cambridgeshire (then in Northamptonshire) home of the Wentworth-Fitzwilliam family, may have influenced the descriptions of Manderley.