Nina Auerbach's 2000 "biography," Daphne du Maurier: Haunted Heiress, is an unusual book. My library classes it as biography but it's really a book of the author's memories of reading du Maurier with a flashlight under the sheets at summer camp combined with literary criticism that laments the fame of those novels demonstrating less of du Maurier's talent and the obscurity of her best work.
Although Auerbach is a feminist critic, an approach that normally makes me sigh and hold my nose, she seems to have more of a grasp of the real du Maurier than many who talk about her "romance" novels. There is precious little romance in Rebecca (1938), or in Jamaica Inn (1936) or Frenchman's Creek (1942) either for that matter.
I picked up this book because my book club is reading Rebecca for our November meeting and I have been reading around before I finally re-read the novel. I started with Jane Eyre because so many critics say that du Maurier was deeply influenced by Charlotte Bronte. Auerbach says no. Just because both books have a wimpy first-person narrator, a large house that burns down, and a love interest with a demonic first wife doesn't mean the novels have anything fundamental in common. I would agree.
Jane starts out in early youth with a backbone of steel and by the time Mr Rochester is through with her and she hits the road she has developed a fully-formed character and is able to resist him with all her being. The unnamed narrator of Rebecca begins and ends the novel subjugating herself to Maxim de Winter. She is a sadder but wiser and better dressed girl when she dreams she goes to Manderly again, but she doesn't fundamentally change. She remains at the mercy of a man, as do most of du Maurier's female protagonists. By the end of Bronte's novel, Jane is Mr Rochester's equal.
Auerbach would have us read other du Maurier novels instead of the three most famous. She recommends Julius (1933), My Cousin Rachel (1951), The Scapegoat (1957), and The Glass-Blowers(1963.) Having read My Cousin Rachel, I can recommend that powerful book without reservation but like most people I have read no other du Maurier except Jamaica Inn, which believe it or not, I read under the covers with a flashlight. No 12-year-old dared read so daring a book in daylight in those more innocent days.
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