Rebecca de Winter

Rebecca de Winter was shot by her husband Maxim and her body disposed of in the bay near Manderley, with her death staged to appear an accidental drowning. In the novel's pivotal boathouse confession scene, Maxim reveals that Rebecca deliberately goaded him into shooting her; having just learned from Dr. Baker that she was dying of inoperable cancer, she engineered her own death to spare herself a slow decline while ensuring Maxim would live under the permanent threat of a murder charge.

Rebecca's central motivation is total autonomy—the refusal to let anyone dictate the terms of her ending. Facing inoperable cancer, she chooses to die on her own schedule rather than endure a protracted illness. At the same time, she weaponises the act against Maxim: by goading him into firing the shot, she ensures he will spend the rest of his life shadowed by the possibility of a murder conviction, exacting revenge on a marriage built on mutual contempt.

Mrs. Danvers is Rebecca's devoted personal maid and the fanatical keeper of her memory, representing the novel's most emotionally intense relationship. Rebecca appears to have cultivated and weaponised Danvers's borderline-pathological devotion while she was alive. After Rebecca's death, Danvers preserves her rooms as a shrine, attempts to manipulate the narrator into suicide, and ultimately burns Manderley to the ground—acting as Rebecca's most loyal and dangerous posthumous surrogate.

No—Rebecca is already dead when the novel begins and never physically appears in a single scene. Du Maurier constructs her entirely through the memories, obsessions, and accounts of other characters: Maxim's confession, Mrs. Danvers's descriptions of her intimate habits, Ben's fearful testimony, and her monogram and handwriting inscribed across Manderley's objects. This makes her one of literature's most powerful absent figures, more commanding in death than most characters are in life.

Dr. Baker's records confirm that Rebecca was suffering from inoperable cancer at the time of her death, which legally transforms her killing from murder into something more ambiguous. His testimony, uncovered during Colonel Julyan's investigation, reframes Rebecca's final act—provoking Maxim to shoot her—as a calculated suicide. This revelation dismantles Favell's blackmail attempt, closes the legal threat to Maxim, and retroactively reinterprets everything Rebecca did on the night she died.

Rebecca exerts total psychological dominance over the narrator entirely through her lingering material presence: her monogram on every object, her handwriting in a book of poetry, her taste inscribed into every surface of Manderley. These remnants reduce the second Mrs. de Winter to feeling like an interloper in her own marriage. The narrator's entire arc is a struggle to escape a woman she never met, making Rebecca the novel's true shaping force and the source of its central conflict.

Du Maurier deliberately keeps Rebecca's moral status unresolvable. She is manipulative, cruel to vulnerable figures like Ben, and engineered her death to destroy her husband—hallmarks of villainy. Yet she also asserted radical self-determination in a world that denied women control over their own lives, and every account of her is filtered through narrators with private agendas, including the man who killed her. The novel insists the reader question whether the final portrait of Rebecca is truth or a self-serving myth.

Favell was Rebecca's cousin and lover, and he attempts to blackmail Maxim after her body is recovered, convinced she was murdered out of jealousy over their affair. Ironically, his pursuit of the truth backfires entirely: the investigation he forces—culminating in the discovery of Dr. Baker's records—reveals that Rebecca was terminally ill, reframing her death as a calculated suicide and legally exonerating Maxim. Favell thus becomes an unwitting instrument of the very outcome he sought to prevent.