thinks her new husband is still in love with his late wife Rebecca. Who will win, Rebecca or the narrator?
             The setting of a novel is the time and place where the actions occur. Maxim De Winter and the narrator marry and return to Mr. De Winter's home, Manderley. Manderley is a picturesque mansion on the English countryside. Manderley was placed along the water, surrounded by gardens, trees, flowers, plants, etc.:
             Yes, there it was, the Manderley I had expected, the Manderley of my picture post-card long ago. A thing of grace and beauty, exquisite and faultless, lovelier even than I have ever dreamed, built in its hollow of smooth grassland and mossy lawns, the terraces sloping to the gardens, and the gardens to the sea (65).
             Manderley was beautiful but it also had an ominous and eerie aspect about it. For example, the path to Manderley had many gloomy and sometimes scary aspects:
             We were amongst the rhododendrons. There was something bewildering, even shocking, about the suddenness of their discovery. The woods had not prepared me for them. They startled me with their crimson faces, massed one upon the other in incredible profusion, showing no leaf, no twig, nothing but the slaughterous red, luscious and fantastic, unlike any rhododendron plant I have ever seen (65).
             The rhododendrons added to the mystique of the house. The setting of Rebecca is what makes the novel sinister and ghostly.
             Rising action is the majority of the story's events that build tension in the conflict. In the novel Rebecca, the events taking place during the rising actions are all incidents
             that show how the conflict is growing tenser. These events are those that make the narrator feel inferior Rebecca. At one point in the novel the narrator finds a book of poetry from Rebecca to Maxim:
             I picked up the book again, and this time opened it at the title-page, and I read the dedication.
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