Du Maurier was desperately homesick; her longing for her home by the sea in Cornwall was, she wrote, “like a pain under the heart continually.” She was also unhappy: this was the first time she had ever accompanied her husband on a posting, and she hated the role forced upon her in Egypt by her marriage.
Shy, and socially reclusive, she detested the small talk and the endless receptions she was expected to attend and give, in her capacity of commanding officer’s wife. This homesickness and her resentment of wifely duties, together with a guilty sense of her own ineptitude when performing them, were to surface in Rebecca: they cluster around the two female antagonists of the novel, the living and obedient second wife, Mrs. de Winter, and the dead, rebellious and indestructible first wife, Rebecca. Both women reflect aspects of du Maurier’s own complex personality: she divided herself between them, and the splitting, doubling and mirroring devices she uses throughout the text destabilize it but give it resonance. With Rebecca we enter a world of dreams and daydreams, but they always threaten to tip over into nightmare.
At first, du Maurier struggled with her material. The novel had a false start, which she described as a “literary miscarriage”—a revealing metaphor, given the centrality of pregnancy and childbirth to the plot and themes of Rebecca, and given the fact that du Maurier’s second child, another daughter—she had hoped for a son—was born during the time she worked on it. She tore up the initial （fifteen-thousand-word-long） attempt at the book, the first time she had ever done this, and an indication, perhaps, of the difficulties she sensed in this material. She began again while still in Egypt, and finally completed it on her return to England.
She sent it off to her publisher, Victor Gollancz, in April 1938. He knew little about the novel at that stage: du Maurier had briefly described it to him as “a sinister tale about a woman who marries a widower… Psychological and rather macabre.” Gollancz must have been somewhat nervous as he awaited that manuscript. Du Maurier’s previous novel, Jamaica Inn, had sold more copies than any of her previous books, bringing her to the brink of bestsellerdom; but she was an unpredictable author, and difficult to categorize. Two of her earlier novels, I’ll Never Be Young Again and The Progress of Julius, had sold much less well, and the sexual frankness of both books—especially the latter, which dealt with father-daughter incest—had been met with distaste from critics.
Gollancz’s reaction to Rebecca was relief, and jubilation. A “rollicking success” was forecast by him, by his senior editor, and by everyone to whom advance copies were sent. Prior to publication, du Maurier’s was the lone dissenting voice in this chorus of approbation. She feared her novel was “too gloomy” to be popular, and she believed the ending was “too grim” to appeal to readers. Gollancz ignored such pessimism: Rebecca was touted to booksellers as an “exquisite love story” with a “brilliantly created atmosphere of suspense.” It was promoted and sold, in short, as a gothic romance.
On publication, some critics acknowledged the book’s haunting power and its vice-like narrative grip, but—perhaps misled by the book’s presentation, or prejudiced by the gender of the author—they delved no deeper. Most reviews dismissed the novel with that belittling diminutive only ever used for novels by women: it was just a “novelette.” Readers ignored them: Rebecca became an immediate and overwhelming commercial success.
The novel went through twenty-eight printings in four years in Britain alone. It became a bestseller in America, and it sold in vast numbers throughout Europe. It continues to sell well to this day: in the sixty-four years since first publication, it has never been out of print. Its readership was swelled by the Oscar-winning success of Hitchcock’s memorable expressionistic film version, and has been increased since by countless theater, radio and television dramatizations. Like Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With the Wind （1936, and another novel that concerns women and property）， Rebecca has made a transition rare in popular fiction: it has passed from bestseller, to cult novel, to cultural classic status. Why is that? What is it about this novel that has always spoken to readers, if not to critics?
Rebecca is the story of two women, one man, and a house. Of the four, as Hitchcock once observed, the house, Manderley, is the dominant presence. Although never precisely located （the word “Cornwall” is never actually used in the novel）， its minutely detailed setting is clearly that of an actual house, Menabilly. Du Maurier discovered Menabilly, on its isolated headland near Fowey, as a young woman, when she first went to live in Cornwall; she wrote a magical account of the first time she saw it. Eventually, after the war, and after Rebecca, she was able to lease the house. She lived there for over twenty years, using it as the location for several other novels; it lit her imagination, and obsessed her, for much of her life. Du Maurier’s own term for Menabilly was the “House of Secrets,” and when she placed it at the heart of Rebecca, she created an elliptical, shifting, and deeply secretive book. The plot hinges upon secrets; the novel’s milieu is that of an era and social class that, in the name of good manners, rarely allowed the truth to be expressed; and suppression coupled with a fearful secretiveness are its female narrator’s most marked characteristics.