he contemplated various works before he settled upon rebecca by daphne du maurier , a true epic of suppressed hysteria , packed to the pants with strongly drawn sensual images of brooding ; the tale of how the emotionally stunted max de winter , lord of a cornish manor , is lured into a pitiless marriage by a gold-digging vamp whom he finally murders after years of enduring her sadistic provocations ; a man who then compounds his matrimonial mistakes by marrying an orphaned adolescent girl from the lower classes .