A young woman marries the widower Maxim de Winter and moves into his estate, Manderley. There, she finds herself haunted by the memory of his first wife, Rebecca, but dark secrets slowly begin to emerge. Considered a work of twentieth-century Gothic fiction, the construction of this novel is intriguing: the narrator has no name or apparent age, and the main character is, in fact, dead but haunts the novel. Tension pervades the entire story, leaving the reader with a sense of impending doom. It is a perfect introduction to gothic literature.
“I wondered how many people there were in the world who suffered, and continued to suffer, because they could not break out from their own web of shyness and reserve, and in their blindness and folly built up a great distorted wall in front of them that hid the truth.”