Rose Tremain imagines the woman behind Du Maurier's Mrs Danvers
The British novelist has expanded a 2014 short story into a full novel speculating on the real-life origins of Rebecca's sinister housekeeper, according to a review in the Guardian.
Rose Tremain's seventeenth novel, The Housekeeper, imagines the events that might have inspired Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca, according to a review published in the Guardian on 5 October. The book grows out of a 2014 short story of the same title, included in Tremain's collection The American Lover, which first floated the idea of an affair between Du Maurier and a fictional housekeeper.
The protagonist, Lilianne Danowski, is a Polish Jew who fled pogroms with her father as a child and who runs the household at Manderville Hall, near Fowey in Cornwall, with what the Guardian describes as reserved efficiency. Known to her employers as Danni because, in the novel's own phrase, Danowski was "a mouthful of fishbones," she is the one deputised to show Du Maurier around the house during a visit, to encourage her to look through the clothes of the household's dead former mistress, and to take her down to the boat house. According to the review, it is this Danowski who, after a year-long affair with Du Maurier, becomes the figure later twisted into Rebecca's Mrs Danvers.
The Guardian situates The Housekeeper in a tradition of novels that began life as short stories, citing Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway in Bond Street, Evan S. Connell's Mrs Bridge, Jeffrey Eugenides's The Virgin Suicides, and Rachel Cusk's New Yorker story Project, which became the opening of her novel Life of M. The review itself is critical of the expanded version, describing it as a "bloodless" origin story for Du Maurier's classic.
Sources
This article was written from these reports.
