This is apparent in the characterisation of the servants, for example. It is also frequently funny, which is not something I remember from the other du Maurier novels that I’ve read.
The descriptions of Philip’s estate, and of Rachel’s house in Italy, are particularly evocative. My Cousin Rachel is a stunning novel – eerie, tense, beautifully written, and sinister. Did she truly have something to do with his death? His final letters home – almost incoherent with illness, madness, or grief – point an accusing finger at his widow, who is heading for Philip’s estate.
Philip’s life is upended when a stranger is introduced into his tiny world: Ambrose, who spends his winter on the continent for his health, unexpectedly marries Rachel, an Italian-English contessa with an obscure connection to the family. Except for brief, reluctant periods of time away at school and university, he has been raised entirely within one small community. Philip is raised for the sole occupation of being Ambrose’s heir, and running the estate.
Ambrose had very set ideas about the world and about women – he raised Philip with no female company, even to the extent of having all-male servants and dogs in his household. Orphaned as a young boy, Philip was taken in and raised by his older cousin Ambrose Ashley, a bachelor in his mid-twenties. The novel opens with Philip Ashley, a wealthy young man in his mid-twenties, reflecting back on the body of a hanged criminal that he saw as a child – a human man reduced to a rotting carcass, set against the sweeping and beautiful Cornish countryside. However, unlike either novel, I somehow couldn’t love it. In common with Frenchman’s Creek, it is historical fiction (set at a nebulous time in, I think, the early Victorian era) in common with Rebecca, it is both beautiful and sinister. It touches on a lot of the same themes – darkness at the core of unhappy marriages, the many different masks that people wear, large Cornish country estates. It has a lot of similarities to Rebecca, in the creation of many ambiguous and duplicitous characters. My Cousin Rachel, published in 1951, is the third Daphne du Maurier novel I have read (the others being Rebecca and Frenchman’s Creek).
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