DARK & DANGEROUS
As The House on the Strand turns 50, Flora Watkins reveals her long-lasting obsession with Daphne du Maurier’s macabre yet seductive works
What makes Daphne du Maurier’s eerie fiction more compelling than ever for modern readers?
‘Perhaps you’re ready for Daphne du Maurier,’ said my mother, and the name alone, so alluring and mysterious, lit my imagination as an adolescent girl.
As I worked my way along the shelf of 1970s Penguin paperbacks, their tangerine spines creased where my mother had returned to certain passages, great doors swung open, like the overgrown gates to Manderley in the second Mrs de Winter’s dream.
It was Rebecca that first made du Maurier famous, inspiring numerous adaptations and spin-offs (indeed, a new Netflix film is currently in production, starring Lily James as the second Mrs de Winter, Kristin Scott Thomas as Mrs Danvers and Armie Hammer as Maxim). Here was a seductive, compelling world, a glimpse of the darkest recesses of the human heart, a hint of what relationships between men and women might involve. No other writer I had read created such a tapestry of atmosphere and tension, such a sense of place.
But it was du Maurier’s penultimate book The House on the Strand, published exactly 50 years ago, that intrigued me most. The narrator Richard Young, tired of his work, wife and stepsons, begins experimenting with a hallucinogenic drug developed by his scientist friend, Magnus. His trips on the drug, while staying at Magnus’ house in Cornwall, take him back 600 years as a silent witness to lives more fascinating than his own.
Perhaps it resonated because I, too, was weary, stifled by the Suffolk countryside of my childhood and longing for diversion and excitement. The House on the Strand, like so many du Maurier novels, chimed with my own nascent suspicions that away from the cottage gardens and cricket matches of my village, things might not be as respectable as they seemed.
Whether the sinister vicar of Altarnun preaching to his unsuspecting flock in Jamaica Inn or the enigmatic Rachel brewing her tisanes in My Cousin Rachel, we are never quite sure whom to trust in du Maurier’s stories. Her endings are so often ambiguous. Did Rachel poison Ambrose? Did Mrs Danvers really set fire to Manderley?
Du Maurier’s grandson, Rupert Tower, whom I met while researching an article marking the 80th anniversary of Rebecca last year, thinks her appeal lies in her ‘emotional intelligence’. Tower is a Jungian analyst, an interest inherited from his grandmother. ‘She has this extraordinary capacity to keep talking about an archetypal human story, the things we all struggle with in our own families,’ he says. ‘I think that’s why she continues to speak to people. She’s not afraid of going into the darkness of human relationships, our murderous capacities, love, jealousy, hate — that makes her so appealing to a reader.’
Du Maurier, one feels, would have no truck with the recent publishing trend for ‘uplit’ – cheerful, optimistic works of literature. Two of her eerie short stories were adapted into famously terrifying films: Hitchcock’s The Birds and Nicolas Roeg’s masterpiece Don’t Look Now. Another of her earliest stories,
The Doll, concerns a young woman’s passion for a mechanical sex-doll. It was an extraordinary subject for a privileged 20-year-old girl, the daughter of the famous actormanager Gerald du Maurier, to be aware of, let alone to explore. There is a dark, erotic charge to her writing. Sex, though never explicit, is always there.
As I sit at my desk, juggling work with the demands of a young family, Richard’s escapism in The House on
the Strand once again looks attractive. But it is du Maurier’s depiction of ‘strong, independent women’ – Dona St Columb in Frenchman’s Creek, Mary Yellan in Jamaica Inn – that is drawing in a younger generation, says a fellow devotee, Dr Laura Varnam of University College, Oxford, who finds that her students are increasingly choosing to write dissertations on du Maurier. ‘Her preoccupations are remarkably modern,’ Varnam explains. ‘Although du Maurier isn’t using the language we are today about gender fluidity, she explores her male narrators’ psyches in a way that’s incredibly fresh.’
And 30 years after her death, though du Maurier novels are now period pieces, they remain timelessly gripping and as relevant as ever. Sarah Perry is the latest novelist to acknowledge her influence, following Sarah Waters and Susan Hill, while du Maurier’s final novel, Rule Britannia, published in 1972 but startlingly prefiguring Brexit, has just been reissued.
With a writer so versatile and prolific – she produced historical fiction (The King’s General), biography (The Infernal World of
Branwell Brontë), poems and plays – there are many more films to be made and theses to be written. And in a few years’ time, I shall be beckoning my own first-born over to my collection of
battered paperbacks. ‘Darling, I think you’re ready for Daphne du Maurier.’