Authors Like Daphne du Maurier

Charlotte Brontë

British · Jane Eyre (1847), Villette (1853)

Brontë was born in Thornton, Yorkshire, in 1816 and grew up at Haworth parsonage with her sisters Emily and Anne. Jane Eyre, published under the name Currer Bell, follows a governess who falls in love with her employer, Mr Rochester, and discovers that his first wife is alive and shut away at Thornfield Hall. She died in 1855.

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Wilkie Collins

British · The Woman in White (1860), The Moonstone (1868)

Collins was born in London in 1824 and was a friend and collaborator of Charles Dickens, whose magazine All the Year Round serialised The Woman in White in 1859–60. The novel, in which a young heiress is shut in an asylum under another woman's name, is told by several narrators in turn; The Moonstone is often called one of the first English detective novels. He died in 1889.

Mary Stewart

British · Madam, Will You Talk? (1955), Nine Coaches Waiting (1958), The Crystal Cave (1970)

Stewart was born in Sunderland in 1916 and taught at Durham University before her first novel. She is often called the pioneer of romantic suspense: Nine Coaches Waiting follows a young English governess at a French château who begins to fear for her pupil's life. She later wrote a series of novels about Merlin, beginning with The Crystal Cave. She died in 2014.

Victoria Holt

British · Mistress of Mellyn (1960)

Victoria Holt was one of many pen names of Eleanor Hibbert (1906–1993), who also wrote historical novels as Jean Plaidy and family sagas as Philippa Carr. Mistress of Mellyn, about a governess in a Cornish house, was so close to Rebecca in setting and mood that some readers guessed Holt was du Maurier under another name. It is credited with reviving the gothic romance, and she sold about 75 million books as Holt.

Shirley Jackson

American · “The Lottery” (1948), The Haunting of Hill House (1959), We Have Always Lived in the Castle (1962)

Jackson (1916–1965) caused a storm with “The Lottery”, published in The New Yorker in 1948, about a village's annual ritual. The Haunting of Hill House, nominated for the National Book Award, follows four people who stay in a house with a history, and We Have Always Lived in the Castle is narrated by Merricat Blackwood, who lives with her sister in the house where the rest of their family was poisoned.

Susan Hill

British · I'm the King of the Castle (1970), The Woman in Black (1983), Mrs de Winter (1993)

Hill was born in Scarborough in 1942. The Woman in Black, about a young solicitor sent to settle the affairs of a dead widow at a remote house on the marshes, became a stage play that ran in London's West End for more than thirty years. In 1993 she published Mrs de Winter, a sequel to Rebecca.

Sarah Waters

Welsh · Fingersmith (2002), The Little Stranger (2009)

Waters was born in Wales in 1966 and made her name with novels set in Victorian and wartime Britain, often about women who love women. Fingersmith, a Victorian crime novel built on a double-cross, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, as was The Little Stranger, set in a decaying Warwickshire manor after the Second World War and narrated by a country doctor.

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Kate Morton

Australian · The House at Riverton (2006), The Forgotten Garden (2008), The Lake House (2015)

Morton was born in Berri, South Australia, and grew up in Queensland. Her novels move between a present-day investigator and a secret buried decades earlier, usually in an English great house: The House at Riverton is narrated by a former housemaid, and The Lake House is set on a Cornish estate where a child vanished in 1933. By 2015 she had sold more than 16 million books.

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Gillian Flynn

American · Sharp Objects (2006), Gone Girl (2012)

Flynn was born in Kansas City in 1971 and worked at Entertainment Weekly before her novels. Gone Girl opens on the day Amy Dunne disappears, her fifth wedding anniversary, and sets her husband's account against her diary; it spent eight weeks at number one on the New York Times list and was filmed by David Fincher in 2014.

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Sally Beauman

British · Destiny (1987), Rebecca's Tale (2001)

Beauman was born in 1944 and had an international bestseller with Destiny. An article she wrote about du Maurier's work for The New Yorker eventually led to Rebecca's Tale, a companion novel that reopens the question of Rebecca's life and death and gives her a voice of her own. She died in 2016.