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Books Like Rebecca
Gothic Suspense Novels Like Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier
Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca is the great Gothic novel of suspense — Manderley, Mrs. Danvers, and the shadow of the perfect first wife. These 8 novels share its atmosphere of dread, its psychological intensity, and its sense that the past refuses to stay buried.
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Buy on AmazonJane Eyre
by Charlotte Brontë
A governess falls in love with the brooding Mr. Rochester at Thornfield Hall, unaware of the secret locked in the attic — du Maurier's Rebecca is in direct conversation with Jane Eyre (Maxim de Winter is Rochester; Manderley is Thornfield), and the two novels together define the English Gothic romance tradition; but where Brontë's heroine is confident in her moral worth, du Maurier's narrator is defined by her insecurity
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Buy on AmazonMy Cousin Rachel
by Daphne du Maurier
A young man inherits a Cornish estate and becomes obsessed with the mysterious widow who may have murdered his guardian — du Maurier's closest companion to Rebecca, sharing its Cornish atmosphere, its unreliable narrator's obsession with a dead person's reputation, and its deliberate refusal to resolve whether the central figure is guilty or innocent
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Buy on AmazonThe Woman in White
by Wilkie Collins
Two narrators investigate the identity of a mysterious woman in white and the aristocratic villain who is persecuting her — Collins's 1859 sensation novel is the ancestor of the psychological suspense plot that Rebecca perfects; where du Maurier internalizes the dread, Collins externalizes it into gothic plot machinery, but the atmosphere of feminine peril and aristocratic menace is shared
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Buy on AmazonWuthering Heights
by Emily Brontë
Heathcliff and Catherine on the Yorkshire moors — the ur-Gothic of English fiction and the dark twin of Jane Eyre; where Rebecca is interested in the haunting of a house by a dead woman's reputation, Wuthering Heights is interested in the haunting of a landscape by an obsessive love that death cannot end; both novels are about the ways the past destroys the present
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Buy on AmazonThe Haunting of Hill House
by Shirley Jackson
Four people invited to spend the summer in the most evil house in the world — Jackson's masterpiece of psychological horror shares Rebecca's technique of using a house as the embodiment of dread and its interest in the psychology of a sensitive, self-doubting narrator who cannot trust her own perceptions; the natural progression for Rebecca readers willing to go further into the dark
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Buy on AmazonRebecca's Tale
by Sally Beauman
An authorized continuation exploring the mystery of Rebecca herself from multiple perspectives, fifty years after the events of du Maurier's novel — Beauman's 2001 novel is the most substantial attempt to give the first Mrs. de Winter her own interiority and story; not du Maurier, but a worthy companion for readers who want more of the world of Manderley
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Buy on AmazonThe Turn of the Screw
by Henry James
A governess at a remote English estate becomes convinced that the children in her care are being corrupted by the ghosts of two dead servants — James's 1898 novella shares Rebecca's technique of building dread through suggestion rather than revelation, its interest in the psychology of a female narrator who may be unreliable, and its use of an English country house as a space of sinister power
- 8Buy on Amazon
Dark Places
by Kate Mosse
A contemporary novelist uncovers a seventeenth-century mystery in a French village — Mosse's atmospheric Gothic shares Rebecca's structure of a present-day narrative haunted by events from the past, its sense that certain places absorb and preserve violence, and its dual-timeline revelation; the most popular contemporary Gothic that shares du Maurier's combination of romance and dark secret
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