![]() Will they live happily ever after? Will Rachel destroy him? Or he her? Until he sees the widowed Rachel and falls in love for the first time. Rachel, Delilah or Madonna, has married Philip's uncle Ambrose in Florence and he has mysteriously died. We can never decide if Rachel is a malign or a benign influence, because du Maurier plays mercilessly with our preconceptions. The good old British status-quo struggles to reassert itself. The Cornwall estate is run entirely by men for men who go every Sunday to a church (Anglican) which has no Madonnas. His uncle Ambrose “sent his nurse packing” and raised the child himself. He is a young man born of man alone, in a sense. ![]() It is another anti-imperialist, feminist narrative told by another flawed narrator, this time a man: Philip Ashley. My Cousin Rachel (1951) does the same thing differently. It's a great mystery thriller, alright, but it is the reader's own romantic assumptions which are most questioned. ![]() Reading it a couple of years ago I was stunned by its complex anti-imperialist, feminist narrative told by a gloriously flawed narrator. I was pretty much marked for life when I saw Hitchcock's Rebecca (1940) as a child, particularly when my mother intoned the opening line: “Last night I dreamed I went to Manderley again.” But I took the Gothic romance at face value. The light of the reader's perspective, that is. ![]() Daphne du Maurier's best novels are like multi-faceted diamonds: different lights transform them. ![]()
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