Working as a lady's companion, the heroine of Rebecca learns her place Her future looks bleak until, on a trip to the South of France, she meets Max de Winter, a handsome widower whose sudden proposal of marriage takes her by surprise She accepts, but whisked from glamorous Monte Carlo to the ominous and brooding Manderley, the new Mrs de Winter finds Max a changed man And the memory of his dead wife Rebecca is forever kept alive by the forbidding housekeeper, Mrs Danvers