“Rebecca” by Daphne du Maurier immediately made its way onto my list of favorite novels when I was just a few chapters into reading it. The story is told from the point of view of a young lady named Mrs. de Winter who finds herself in the midst of a very secretive marriage to a man whose first wife, Rebecca, was recently drowned in a mysterious accident. Mrs. de Winter moves in with her new husband and must live under the constant scrutiny of the fearsome housekeeper. She eventually realizes that an important secret regarding the recently deceased Rebecca is being kept from her, and she must cope with the frightening consequences of it.

I am certainly biased because my immediate liking of the book was largely due to Mrs. de Winter’s eerily similar thought process to my own. I find comfort in her discomfort that so closely matches my own anxiety, and sympathize with her constant over-analyzing of every situation that presents itself to her. Her uncanny similarity to myself made me feel as though I were the object of the novel, and I was therefore doubly interested in the storyline.

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I am a fan of gothic novels because I love the atmosphere of horror and mystery that characterizes the genre. “Rebecca” perfectly fits into this description as every chapter increases in horrific uncertainty until the final stirring revelation. Even after the mystery is revealed and the storyline begins to wrap up, another frightening event takes place that ends the novel on an ambiguous note, leaving me with a lingering feeling of unease for the fate of the characters. This uncertainty present even at the end of the novel is one of my favorite aspects of the gothic genre.

I appreciate the simplicity of Daphne du Maurier’s writing, which gets the point across in an articulate way that refrains from being pretentious. I find the narrator to be likeable, though somewhat frustratingly reserved, again much like myself. The combination of Mrs. de Winter’s distinctive voice and the novel’s constant obscurity pair together perfectly to form one of my most-loved classic novels.