Reviewed by Harriet
Last night I dreamed I saw Daphne again
I doubt if there are many readers who won’t be familiar with Rose Tremain, many of whose novels have been reviewed on Shiny over the years, mainly by me. Her range is impressive, covering many eras and many countries. I first discovered her in 1986 when I read her wonderful Restoration, and have followed her with great enjoyment over the last 40 years. She’s 83 now, and still writing, which is an achievement in itself.
Following her interest in historical periods, she’s set her most recent novel in the 1930s and it takes place mainly in Manderville Hall, a large, grand house owned by the elderly widower Lord Greville-Whithers, in Cornwall. This, together with the novel’s opening line quoted above, leaves little doubt that we are in du Maurier country, and indeed Daphne plays a central part in the novel. But she’s not the central character or the narrator. This is Lilianne Maria Danowski, known as Danni, the housekeeper at Manderville Hall. A Polish-Jewish immigrant, Danni has been traumatised in her childhood by racial abuse and bullying, and by the experience of fleeing the pogroms with her father. She has learned to hide her feelings, and although she is much admired and respected at Manderville, she has always felt like an outsider.
Early in the novel, the young aspiring novelist Daphne du Maurier visits Manderville, and Danni offers to show her round the house. She takes her into the bedroom of the dead mistress of the house and proudly shows off her beautiful clothes. When she takes her down to the boat house on the shore of the cove, a passionate affair between them quickly develops. Danni is completely swept away, but Daphne is married, though she has always concealed her distaste for men and her powerful desire for women. The affair lasts for a year, with an unforgettable period in an empty London house, where Daphne takes Danni out shopping for beautiful clothes and gives her a luxurious fox fur coat. However, the affair is discovered by Adelaide, Lord Greville-Withers’ deeply unpleasant niece, who threatens to disclose all if Danni does not give notice and leave at once. Knowing the effect this would have on Daphne’s career, Danni leaves sadly, and sets up a dressmaking business in a nearby town, and no longer sees Daphne. One day she discovers that Daphne has published a new novel. It is called Rebecca and has a powerful, malicious housekeeper whose name is Mrs Danvers. The novel has an epigraph: ‘Forgive me, Danni’. Danni never recovers from this betrayal, and the ending is extremely sad.
I did have some reservations about the novel, and I think its history may explain that. It started life as a short story which Tremain published in a collection in 2014. After its publication she was approached by a Hollywood filmmaker, who asked if she would write a screenplay based on the story. She did, and the film will be released later this year. During the writing, she became fascinated by Danni’s past as a Polish-Jewish refugee, which is not enlarged on in the story, and decided to adapt the screenplay into a full length novel, which has actually been published before the release of the film. So my main reservation is that the extra material, which looks at Danni’s life after Daphne, did not hold my attention as much as the earlier part, and I think the narrative would have been more powerful without it.
That being said, there is much to admire in the novel. The setting and social mores are wonderfully captured, and the characters wholly believable. I believe some du Maurier fans have been upset by her portrayal as a closet lesbian (a description that she would not have accepted) but there is substantial evidence in her private correspondence that she led what she would call a double life. She believed that she had been born in the wrong body and had another side, which she described as ‘the boy in the box’, and had several documented relationships with women. So this important side of Tremain’s Daphne, and her deep fear of its revelation, which she believes would destroy her career, is the driving force of the book and I found it wholly believable. And of course anyone who knows Rebecca will enjoy the allusions to the novel: Manderville/Manderlay, the secluded boathouse and the secret meetings there, the scene in the dead woman’s bedroom, and the costume ball. Also, there’s a moment when Daphne looks up at seagulls soaring overhead, and thinks about how frightening it would be if they turned on humans, which points forward to du Maurier’s 1952 short story ‘The Birds’, which would become a Hitchcock film.
So despite my reservations I did enjoy the novel, and I’m sure others will, whether they know Rebecca or not. I’m looking forward to seeing how the film measures up.
Harriet is one of the founders and a co-editor of Shiny.
Rose Tremain, The Housekeeper (Chatto & Windus, 2026). 978-1784745936, 320pp., hardback.
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