Literary greats: Rebecca - Love, paranoia, obsession

-- She's one of the most famous heroines in English literature - up there with Jane Eyre and Elizabeth Bennet - and yet we don't even know her name. Although Daphne du Maurier's novel Rebecca was an immediate bestseller when it was published in 1938 - and was made into an Oscar-winning film two years later by Alfred Hitchcock - its narrator is curiously anonymous. Even when she marries the novel's rich widower Maxim de Winter, she simply becomes the second Mrs de Winter. The name we all remember - Rebecca - is that of de Winter's dead first wife, who haunts the novel and drives the heroine half mad with jealousy and fear.

Once dismissed as a Gothic romance, as "women's fiction", Rebecca is now regarded as the most extraordinary psychological thriller - tapping into our most primal fear of the rival: the woman who is more beautiful, more accomplished than ourselves. From Sylvia Plath's legacy to the second Mrs Ted Hughes, to Linda McCartney and Heather Mills, it is hard for a second wife to compete with the memory of the first.

Du Maurier, who was aware of Freud and Jung, has fashioned a strange, hallucinatory novel that exerts a powerful narrative grip. Full of surreal dream sequence and repressed sexuality, it does not flinch from portraying murder or suicide. The writer saw it as "rather grim", even "unpleasant", a study in jealousy with nothing of the "exquisite love story" her publisher claimed it to be.

And yet Rebecca is hugely popular. Woman's Hour voted it as one of the top five most romantic novels of all time. Since 1938 it has never been out of print. Its opening line ("Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again") is among the most famous in modern literature. There have been numerous film, stage and TV adaptations. Next month, the British Film Institute releases a new print of Hitchcock's film starring Joan Fontaine and Laurence Olivier. --