Techniques used in Rebecca are duplicated or reworked in My Cousin Rachel. Both novels are narrated in first person, and both open with the narrators looking back on the tragic events that make up the plot. With the opening of My Cousin Rachel, Philip remembers first a hanged man he saw as a child and then Rachel, whose guilt he still cannot determine. The novel ends by returning to the opening scene: "They used to hang men at Four Turnings in the old days. Not any more, though."

As a Gothic novel, My Cousin Rachel focuses on a house very much like Manderley in Rebecca. To Philip, the house where his cousin Ambrose brought him to live is a sanctuary until Rachel comes to live in it and upsets the peaceful life he once knew. Appropriately, this home becomes the means to kill Rachel...