#daphne du maurier
BOOK REVIEW: Frenchman’s Creek (1941) by Daphne du Maurier
Frenchman’s Creek is a historical novel set during the reign of Charles II that tells the story of a wealthy woman named Dona who moves to an isolated house in Cornwall with her children to get away from her schlubby husband and the judgmental looks of London society. Finally away from prying eyes and spousal demands, she feels like a weight has been lifted off her shoulders; she revels in the solitude and the freedom it provides her. Dona spends her days lying in the grass and blissfully exploring her surroundings – until she finds a pirate ship hidden in a remote creek near her house. She ends up falling in love with the captain of the crew – brooding, sexy stubble, will draw you like one of his French girls, you know the type – and has to make a decision: does she do what society wants her to do and stay at home with her children or does she leave everything behind for a life of sex love and adventure?
Oh yeah. It’s that kind of book. …Or is it?
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April 12th marked the anniversary of Alfred Hitchcock’s 1940 film Rebecca. Here is my painting of Joan Fontaine, part of my Hitchcock series
Prints:www.etsy.com/shop/RuneWorksProductions
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the narrator of Rebecca realizes some guests have arrived early and the one person she knows well (her husband) isn’t here and her immediate first thought is to climb out the window and hide in the garden before anyone spots her so they just assume she isn’t home so she doesn’t have to deal with meeting new people without her husband there to be a social buffer
and they say classic literature isn’t relatable
In Italy, Hitchcock’s Rebecca (1940) was released as La Prima Moglie (The First Wife). That’s a compelling title, especially when presented alongside images of Judith Anderson’s intimidating Mrs Danvers and Joan Fontaine’s naive young woman. If you weren’t familiar with the story when you saw a cinema lobby card like the one above, you could quite easily assume that the woman in black was the first wife herself. That draws Danny and her beloved mistress even closer together in the imagination. The unhinged housekeeper isn’t just ‘standing in’ for Rebecca anymore. She is Rebecca.
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These are her slippers. ‘Throw me my slips, Danny,’ she used to say. She had little feet for her height. Put your hands inside the slippers. They are quite small and narrow, aren’t they?
She forced the slippers over my hands, smiling all the while, watching my eyes. ‘You never would have thought she was so tall, would you?’ she said, ‘These slippers would fit a tiny foot. She was so slim too. You would forget her height, until she stood beside you. She was every bit as tall as me. But lying there in bed she looked quite a slip of a thing, with her mass of dark hair, standing out from her face like a halo.’
-Rebecca (1938) by Daphne du Maurier
I like the echoes in the text: from ‘slippers’ to 'slips’ and 'slip of a thing’. They reinforce the idea that obsessive Mrs Danvers has a one-track mind.
The movie still - rather wonderfully unnerving, with Judith Anderson’s housekeeper ‘watching [the second wife’s] eyes’ - suggests that this moment from the novel was filmed even though it doesn’t appear in the final version of Hitchcock’s Rebecca(1940).
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Rebecca (1940)
“Luxury has never appealed to me. I like simple things, books, being alone, or with somebody who understands.”—Daphne du Maurier (b. 13 May 1907)
“Punctuated by clues that repeatedly point to Rebecca’s, Danvers’s and Fontaine’s queer desires, the novel and film weave nonheterosexual lures into their narrative fabrics. Rebecca’s sapphic menace is constructed on the coattails of homophobic stereotyping: Rebecca is monstrous, diseased, nonreproductive, destructive, unnatural, masculine, and a man hater. She is also strikingly beautiful, powerful, and alluring enough to sustain the attentions of her housekeeper and her successor and to jeopardize the success of the film’s primary heterosexual union. That the queer’s most influential and engaging attributes belong to a character who is physically absent from the film underscore both the potency of her threat and the limitations of patriarchal structures of representation—structures in which queerness is relegated to discourses of invisibility and silence.”
—Rhona J. Berenstein, from “‘I’m not the sort of person men marry’: Monsters, Queers and Hitchcock’s Rebecca”
Starts today: the US/Canadian premiere of Jamaica Inn, starring Jessica Brown Findlay, Matthew McNulty, Sean Harris, and Joanne Whalley. Watch it now at https://acorn.tv/franchise/jamaicainn!
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Moodboard: Aesthetic - Spring Cottagecore (2)
❝There was something rather blowzy about roses in full bloom, something shallow and raucous like women with untidy hair.❞
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Moodboard: Art Appreciation - March.
❝The first days of spring came, being in themselves a blend of torment and delight.❞
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Rebecca: Living with Ghosts and Bottling Up Memories
Last night I read Rebecca again and was struck by the similarities in the relationship between its three central characters and Michael and me.
I read Daphne du Maurier’s haunting 1938 classic first in my early twenties and was transfixed by this twisting tale of gauzy enchantment and creeping fear. Always a sucker for a gothic romance, I was mesmerized from the first paragraph.
I must’ve…
