My Cousin Rachel

My Cousin Rachel is a novel by the English writer Daphne du Maurier, published in 1951 and set mainly on an estate in Cornwall.

Philip Ashley was orphaned as a baby and brought up by his older cousin Ambrose, the owner of a large country house on the Cornish coast, so that he grew up knowing no women at all and expecting to inherit the place in time. When Ambrose winters in Florence for his health he writes home about his marriage and then about his illness, and the letters accuse his new wife of harming him. Philip inherits the estate along with a hatred of a woman he has never met, and then Rachel comes to Cornwall to stay, and everything he had settled in advance begins to move. The novel is narrated by Philip, which means the reader sees Rachel only through the eyes of a young man who has already decided what he wants to be true.

Du Maurier wrote the book after Rebecca, and the two novels share an estate, an unreliable narrator and a woman whose guilt can never be settled.