Rebecca by daphne du maurier?

were doing a discussion on this book tomorrow and i need to have 10 questions about the setting to start a discussion. can you please help!! ill give points and everything!!!

Rebecca by daphne du maurier?
This is "Rebecca," published in 1938. It was a bestseller in England and the United States, and in 1940 was produced as a movie by David O. Selznick, an extraordinary work of cinematic art starring Laurence Olivier, Joan Fontaine and Judith Anderson and directed by Alfred Hitchcock, his first film for an American studio. Thanks in great measure to the movie, the book has been steadily in print ever since, in one paperback edition after another, and to this day enjoys sales that would be envied by many a Flavor of the Month author of ostensibly "serious" fiction.





It is no exaggeration to say that du Maurier was the 20th century's Charlotte Bronte and "Rebecca" the 20th century's "Jane Eyre." The parallels between the two authors and the two books are obvious. Though Bronte's childhood circumstances were straitened and du Maurier's privileged, both girls lived essentially interior lives in which imagination, storytelling and fantasy were central. Both published early (Bronte under the pseudonym Currer Bell) and both became wildly successful; Michael Mason, in his introduction to the Penguin Classics edition of "Jane Eyre," says it "may be the most read novel in English," and he may be right. Both women eventually married, du Maurier eagerly and Bronte reluctantly.





Over the years there have been countless imitations of "Jane Eyre." Whether "Rebecca" is in fact one of these is debatable, but the similarities do tend to leap out. Jane Eyre is governess to a wealthy girl; the unnamed narrator of "Rebecca" is companion to a wealthy older woman. Both women (19 and 21 years old, respectively) are mousy in appearance (or think they are) and beleaguered by self-doubt. Both come into the employ of brooding, mysterious men in their forties -- Edward Fairfax Rochester and Maxim de Winter -- and both fall in love with them. Both men harbor dreadful secrets: Jane learns Rochester's on the eve of their wedding, the heroine of "Rebecca" learns de Winter's after three months of marriage. The majestic country mansions owned by both men burn to the ground in spectacular conflagrations. Happy endings are achieved, but at a high price.





It is tempting to pigeonhole "Rebecca" as "Jane Lite," but that simply is not true. If it hasn't quite the depth, if at times it lapses into conventions of the gothic novel or the English mystery novel, "Rebecca" is nonetheless a work of immense intelligence and wit, elegantly written, thematically solid, suspenseful even a second time around.





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