Last
night I dreamt I went to Manderley again. It seemed to me I stood
by the iron gate leading to the drive, and for a while I could not
enter, for the way was barred to me. There was a padlock and a chain
upon the gate. I called in my dreams to the lodge-keeper, and had
no answer, and peering closer through the rusted spokes of the gate
I saw that the lodge was uninhabited…
It
is a little bit of cliché, I am afraid, to begin anything about
Daphne Du Maurier with the first words from her most famous book, Rebecca,
and yet who can resist such a perfect opening paragraph, such a good
beginning, immediately intriguing and evocative.
This year
is the centenary of the birth of the British novelist, Daphne Du Maurier.
Du Maurier was a hugely successful and popular author from very early
in her publishing career, her best-known novel, Rebecca, was
a great success upon its publication in 1938 and immediately made into
the film of the same name by Alfred Hitchcock. Some of Du Maurier’s
other well-known novels include Jamaica Inn and My Cousin
Rachel, and of the many short stories that she wrote too have been
made into memorable films, ‘The Birds’ (also by Hitchcock,
and still scary after all these years) and Nicolas Roeg’s wonderfully
creepy and sad version of ‘Don’t Look Now’.
Du Maurier
was born into a glamorous, famous family. Her grandfather, Gerald Du
Maurier, was a well known cartoonist for Punch magazine and
author, perhaps best known now for his novel Trilby (which makes for
uneasy reading for a contemporary reader with its crude stereotypical
depiction of a fictional Jewish impresario named Svengali). Her father,
George Du Maurier, was a famous actor in his day. After Du Maurier’s
death in 1989, Margaret Forster’s biography revealed that she
had also been bisexual (although remaining with her husband until his
death) and had been both deeply in love (unrequited) with the wife of
her publishers, Ellen Doubleday, and engaged in an affair with actress
Gertrude Lawrence. In today’s deeply reactionary climate of identity
politics, this is seen to give more depth and interest to Du Maurier’s
work.
In her
own time, Du Maurier was often dismissed as a romantic novelist, an
author who wrote mainly for a female, popular audience, with her mix
of mystery, romance and suspense. Margaret Forster has argued, however,
that Du Maurier’s work managed to be both great literature and
popular. So, what kind of novels did Du Maurier write? Well, I do not
believe that Du Maurier did write great literature. I am not a utilitarian
and do not believe that push-pin is as good as poetry, that the value
of a pass time is simply how much pleasure it brings. We can and should
judge literature and art. Some works are better than others, more important
because they offer far more than entertainment. Truly great works of
literature, such as War and Peace, or Middlemarch,
are profound insights into and discussions of society and intense explorations
of the inner life and psychology of the individual (and, of course,
very romantic as all who have sympathised with Dorothea and Will must
agree).
These,
however, are amongst the greatest works of literature, and having said
that, one sometimes wants a relaxing game of push-pin and there is nothing
wrong with a novel that is just a well-written, evocative and gripping
story. In fact there is little to be compared to the pure pleasure and
escapism that comes from reading a really good novel. I say ‘just’
here of course with tongue in cheek, as if it were a simple thing to
pull off. In fact, there are few novels that can match Du Maurier’s
Rebecca. To call Du Maurier a ‘romantic novelist’ unfairly
conjures visions of shallow, torrid Barbara Cartland or dismal and badly
written Catherine Cookson.
This is
to do Du Maurier a great disservice, Du Maurier was no George Elliot,
but Rebecca is without a doubt one of the best novels ever written.
Critics point out its shallow and unbelievable characters and lack of
character development, but whilst it is true that Rebecca is not a novel
concerned with the inner life of its characters, I can only think that
these critics cannot have been reading the same novel. Rebecca is
nearly perfect as a novel: from the opening lines, to the slow revelation
of what Rebecca was really like, to the atmosphere of Manderley and
the Cornish coast beneath it, it is possibly word perfect, in pace,
atmosphere and plot.
We never
know the first name of the heroine and narrator of the book, the second
Mrs De Winter. Rebecca refers to the late Mrs De Winter, whose presence
seems to haunt Manderley, the grand house that the young and gauche
heroine comes to. Rebecca seems to haunt her marriage also to the dashing,
older Maxim, and one feels the agonies of the timid and uncertain young
heroine, convinced her new husband still loves Rebecca and too shy in
her grand new home even to own up to breaking one of her own ornaments.
Not to mention, of course, the horrible Mrs Danvers, the house-keeper
and maid to the first Mrs De Winter, who hates the new wife with an
intensity only equalled by her infatuation for the late Rebecca.
Rebecca
is utterly gripping from the first page, and anyone who is thinking
of starting it should make sure that they have a day off in which to
read it, as I defy anyone to start it and put it down before they have
reached the end. Du Maurier’s other best-known novels do not perhaps
equal Rebecca, but are nonetheless thoroughly enjoyable novels,
from the mysterious goings on at Jamaica Inn, to the melancholy
and chilling My Cousin Rachel, in which a man gradually becomes
convinced that his beloved cousin’s widow is also his cousin’s
murderer.
Du Maurier
wrote some very good novels and short stories and one masterpiece of
storytelling, and that is no mean feat by any standards.
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