I would like to contest the genre tag that labeled Rebecca as "romance." For if one considers the foil between Mrs Van Hopper and Maxim, plus the focal point around identity (read: nameless narrator), then if you review the "top" frame of the narrative (as this is a story within a story), also just objectively looking at Maxim and the narrator and that instance where she chooses to go along with him in that third act... Also even if you just compare Rebecca not as some psycho Mrs Rochester, but like a woman with her own opinion, versus the nameless narrator. Like, in what sense is this a romance? 

It's like if you call John Fowles's The Collector a romance: are we not, then, missing the point?

I was lucky enough to read an essay by Sally Beauman, a contemporary author who also breathes modern air into the Victorian Gothic atmosphere, and she brought up helpful background context of du Maurier's split self challenges, as a reclusive woman and the wife to a lieutenant stationed, around the time of Rebecca's conception, in Egypt. She also amplified the importance of the dream-like sequences, not only with which we see Manderley and ghosts of Rebecca (and possibly the acts of others?), but also in our opening chapters.

The East and West were also fascinating, as Beauman reminds us how Rebecca occupies the latter wing and the narrator the former, and how the cardinal directions are symbols. But also, notice how they resurface at the start and end, again remembering one of the narrator's final dreams where she basically conflated herself with Rebecca (p. 426):
"It looks almost as though the dawn was breaking over there, beyond those hills. It can't be though, it's too early.'
"'It's the wrong direction,' he said, 'you're looking west.'
"'I know,' I said. 'it's funny, isn't it?"' (P. 427)
"On and on, now east now west, wound the poor thread that once had been our drive... this path led but to a labyrinth" (p. 2)