Like Wilkie Collins before her and Sarah Waters today, du Maurier had a preternatural understanding of how to engineer suspense she knew how to make you wait and want and when to deliver the final blow. There is the pleasure of her plots, those marvelously efficient machines.
Youth is treated as an embarrassing if unavoidable affliction, thankfully temporary. Her novels, in particular, reify adulthood. Why do we love du Maurier so? There’s an element of nostalgia, to be sure, for the books we read when we were young and impatient not to be. She taught me to read with her own battered copies of “Rebecca” and “My Cousin Rachel,” a book that begins with a corpse swinging from a gibbet and features, in short order, sexual obsession, attempted strangling and possible laudanum poisoning. And then there’s my mother, whose indifference to convention, especially where child-rearing was concerned, reminds me very much of du Maurier. I’ve never known a writer to make otherwise sensible, not especially bookish women chase down first editions “as investments” to cling to, as my sister does, a childhood copy of “Frenchman’s Creek” in unspeakable condition. What begins as a taste for her twisty plots, briny wit and bracingly bleak view of marriage becomes an addiction (and one that can withstand some very purple prose). “Give me a girl at an impressionable age and she is mine for life,” Muriel Spark’s Jean Brodie declared, and so it is with Daphne du Maurier.
It even found admirers on both sides of the war: Neville Chamberlain took his copy with him when he flew to Munich to meet Hitler, and the Germans, in turn, fashioned a cryptogram from the text.īut to women - some women, my kind of women - this book is something more, not merely beloved or popular but foundational. The novel inspired the film adaptation directed by Alfred Hitchcock, spinoffs and a line of watches. What happened was “Rebecca,” an instant best seller that has never gone out of print and still sells about 50,000 copies a year, according to its British publishers. “Until wife 2 is haunted day and night … a tragedy is looming very close and crash! Bang! Something happens.” “Very roughly, the book will be about the influence of a first wife on a second,” she wrote. In 1937 an Englishwoman - bright and bored and drowning in children - sat down and sketched out a story.
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