Rebecca

An unnamed young woman working as a paid companion meets and, after a brief courtship in Monte Carlo, marries Maximilian de Winter, a wealthy widower who brings her home to Manderley, his grand estate on the Cornish coast. The house still runs entirely in the shadow of his first wife, Rebecca, drowned the year before in a sailing accident, and the housekeeper Mrs. Danvers, devoted to Rebecca's memory, uses every opportunity to remind the new bride how completely she fails to measure up. When Rebecca's boat is found with a body still inside it, Maxim finally tells his wife the truth: he shot Rebecca himself, provoked by her taunting confession that she was carrying another man's child and intended to raise it as his heir. The inquest returns a verdict of suicide, and when Rebecca's cousin tries to prove murder, a London doctor's record that she was dying of cancer and could never have borne a child hands her a motive to die, and Maxim escapes prosecution. Mrs. Danvers disappears, and Maxim rushes home to find Manderley itself on fire, the narrator watching from a distance as the house that never accepted her burns to the ground.

Du Maurier never gives her narrator a name, which turns the entire novel into a study of a woman erased by someone else's legend before she has even had the chance to become herself. It reads as gripping, atmospheric suspense from its famous opening line, last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again, onward, building dread out of a house and a dead woman rather than out of any villain physically present for most of the book.

Victor Gollancz published Rebecca in August 1938, and it sold 2.8 million copies by 1965, remaining in steady print ever since; du Maurier herself was dismissed for years by critics as a mere romantic novelist despite writing what is, underneath its love story, a murder confession and its cover up.