Only here Du Maurier artfully turns the tables, handing the power and control to the woman. Nothing new about this it is after all a position in which women have found themselves for centuries. But no, he wakes next morning – ecstatic and feeling that “everything in life was now resolved” – to discover that the object of his affections is cool and distant, acting as if nothing much has happened.ĭaphne du Maurier in New York, 1947. Having already lost his heart, he is then (very willingly) initiated into sex, assuming all the time that marriage, or at least everlasting love, is on the cards. In some ways it is an age-old story, albeit with a trademark Du Maurier twist: sexually inexperienced 25-year-old becomes infatuated with someone 10 years older. I doubt there’s a phrase in the entire novel which better sums up what Daphne du Maurier is up to. In fact, revisiting this fantastically well-wrought novel of suspicions and betrayals some four decades later – and watching Roger Michell’s startlingly honest new film, starring Rachel Weisz – they might as well be lit in blazing neon. Now though, rather like its protagonist, I am also stopped in my tracks.
I wonder if I even noticed these three brooding little words when I first read My Cousin Rachel as a teenager.
0 kommentar(er)
