Slowly, slowly, the pattern turned in on itself, like a kaleidoscope, until Daphne was Rebecca, and her husband was ready to kill her and replace her with a younger woman.
The story of the D Phil student, nameless until the novel’s close, replays Rebecca, which, we are reminded, is in itself a reworking of Jane Eyre. Du Maurier’s collaborator in her biography of Branwell, disgraced Brontë scholar J. A. Symington, shares with Branwell numerous characteristics.
The result is a book that is self-referential and inward-looking — it offers few insights. The fictional Daphne wonders whether writing is all meaningless, and the modern-day narrator recognises what we have known all along, that she is not defined by du Maurier’s fictions. Happily, in reaching these workaday conclusions, Daphne takes the reader on a 400-page journey that is one of undiluted pleasure.
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