Some commentators have noted parallels with Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre.[4][5] Another of du Maurier's works, Jamaica Inn, is also linked to one of the Brontë sisters' works, Emily's Wuthering Heights. Du Maurier commented publicly in her lifetime that the book was based on her own memories of Menabilly and Cornwall, as well as her relationship with her father.[6] While du Maurier "categorised Rebecca as a study in jealousy ... she admitted its origins in her own life to few."[3] Her husband had been "engaged before - to glamorous, dark-haired Jan Ricardo. The suspicion that Tommy remained attracted to Ricardo haunted Daphne."[3] In The Rebecca Notebook of 1981, du Maurier "'remembered' Rebecca's gestation ... "Seeds began to drop. A beautiful home... a first wife... jealousy, a wreck, perhaps at sea, near to the house... But something terrible would have to happen, I did not know what..."[3] She wrote in her notes prior to writing: "I want to built up the character of the first [wife] in the mind of the second... until wife 2 is haunted day and night... a tragedy is looming very close and CRASH! BANG! something happens.""[3] Du Maurier and her husband, "Tommy Browning, like Rebecca and Maximilian de Winter, were not faithful to one another." Subsequent to the novel's publication, "Jan Ricardo, tragically, died during the Second World War [she] threw herself under a train."[3]
Childhood visits to Milton Hall, Cambridgeshire (then in Northamptonshire) home of the Wentworth-Fitzwilliam family, may have influenced the descriptions of Manderley.[7]
Also it is to be mention that Daphne du Maurier was said to be bisexual. That may have something to do with the relationship in the book.
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