Married to a man who had previously been engaged to a beautiful socialite, Daphne du Maurier was acquainted with the feelings of jealousy aroused by a mate's former love. Although her own marriage did not include the darker aspects of her novel Rebecca's haunting plot, the author did identify with the psychology of her narrator. She too created in her mind the image of another woman who had shared a past with her husband. And like her narrator, du Maurier often wondered what had kept her husband and his former fiancee from enjoying a blissful wedded life together.
Raising women of the social elite. Throughout Rebecca, the narrator (the second Mrs. de Winter) comments on the social disparity between her husband, Maxim de Winter, and herself. Not having been brought up for a lifestyle of grandeur, the narrator acts shy and embarrassed when introduced to the friends and family members of her husband's class. She constantly compares herself to Maxim's former wife, the beautiful debutante, Rebecca, who had assuredly socialized with England's gentry. This feeling of awkwardness is understandable in light of the fact that upper-class British women of the 1930s were brought up simply to expect to fulfill a future role as the wife of a wealthy man.
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