Where to Start with Daphne du Maurier: A Reading Guide
Where to start with Daphne du Maurier — whether to begin with Rebecca, My Cousin Rachel, or Jamaica Inn. A complete reading guide to du Maurier's novels.
Daphne du Maurier (1907–1989) is the British novelist who perfected the Gothic romance and made it one of the dominant fictional forms of the twentieth century. Her novels — set almost exclusively in Cornwall, the wild southwestern peninsula of England she loved and made her home — combine atmospheric landscape, psychological dread, obsessive love, and the revelation of secrets with a narrative momentum that keeps readers reading through the night. Alfred Hitchcock adapted Rebecca and The Birds (the latter from her short story); her influence on popular fiction, particularly psychological suspense, is enormous and largely unacknowledged.
Where to Start: Rebecca (1938)
The essential du Maurier — and one of the great English Gothic novels. The narrator (never named) is a young woman of modest background who meets Maxim de Winter, a wealthy widower, in Monte Carlo and marries him with startling speed. At Manderley, his ancestral Cornish estate, she finds herself thoroughly defeated by the memory of Rebecca, Maxim’s first wife — beautiful, accomplished, universally adored — who haunts the house through the zealotry of the housekeeper Mrs. Danvers, who worshipped her. The nameless narrator is overwhelmed by inadequacy and jealousy of a dead woman.
The novel is a masterpiece of atmosphere and suspense — its Cornwall setting is one of the great landscapes in fiction — and its central revelation, when Maxim finally explains the truth about Rebecca, is perfectly constructed. It is one of the most compulsively readable novels in the language.
My Cousin Rachel (1951)
Du Maurier’s most complex and most disturbing novel — a study in unreliable narration that refuses to give its reader the satisfying resolution of Rebecca. Philip Ashley, a young Cornishman raised by his bachelor cousin Ambrose, inherits the estate after Ambrose dies in Florence, possibly poisoned by his Italian wife Rachel. When Rachel arrives in Cornwall, Philip’s fury becomes infatuation and then reckless love; he gives her access to his fortune and eventually to his estate. Whether Rachel is a scheming poisoner or an innocent woman destroyed by male paranoia is the question du Maurier refuses to answer, and the refusal is the novel’s greatest achievement.
Jamaica Inn (1936)
Du Maurier’s first major success — a Gothic adventure set on the Bodmin Moor in the early nineteenth century. Mary Yellan arrives at Jamaica Inn to live with her aunt Patience and her brutal uncle Joss Merlyn, a landlord who runs a gang of wreckers who lure ships to their destruction on the rocks and murder the survivors. The novel is more straightforwardly atmospheric than Rebecca — its pleasures are those of the Gothic thriller, the desolate landscape, and the mystery of the albino vicar Francis Davey — and it remains one of the great evocations of the Cornish moor.
Frenchman’s Creek (1941)
Du Maurier’s most romantic novel — set in the Restoration period, following Dona St. Columb, a beautiful aristocratic woman fleeing the tedium of London society to her remote Cornish estate, where she discovers that a French pirate has been using the creek on her land as his base. Their love affair — and her decision about whether to sail away with him or return to her life and her children — is du Maurier at her most openly romantic, less Gothic than her other work but equally atmospheric. An excellent novel for readers who love the Cornwall setting and du Maurier’s prose without wanting the psychological darkness of My Cousin Rachel.
The House on the Strand (1969)
Du Maurier’s most original novel — a time-travel story set in the same Cornwall she had written about for forty years, but now reaching back six hundred years. Dick Young, staying at Kilmarth House in Cornwall, is given an experimental drug by his friend Magnus, a biophysicist, that transports him back to fourteenth-century Cornwall while his body remains in the present. The medieval world he visits becomes an obsession; the modern world (his American wife, his friend Magnus’s unexplained death) becomes intrusive and unreal. A profoundly atmospheric novel about the seductive power of the past.
Reading Daphne du Maurier
Du Maurier’s Cornwall — the fog, the sea, the granite moor, the crumbling houses — is as much the subject of her fiction as her plots and characters. Begin with Rebecca for the most complete and the most celebrated demonstration of her gifts; read My Cousin Rachel for the most sophisticated psychological complexity; approach Jamaica Inn for atmospheric Gothic adventure; try The House on the Strand when you want her most unusual and intellectually inventive work. All five novels listed here reward reading; all are best read with the Cornish coast somewhere in your imagination.
Frequently Asked Questions
Where should I start with Daphne du Maurier?
Rebecca (1938) is both the most widely read and the essential starting point — the Gothic novel in which an unnamed young woman marries the wealthy Maxim de Winter and comes to live at Manderley, his vast Cornwall estate, where the shadow of his first wife Rebecca — brilliant, beautiful, and dead — dominates everything. It is du Maurier's masterpiece and one of the most compulsively readable novels in the English language: all atmosphere, dread, and revelation. My Cousin Rachel is the best alternative for readers who want du Maurier's most morally ambiguous psychological novel; Jamaica Inn for her most atmospheric adventure.
What is Rebecca about?
Rebecca (1938) is narrated by a young, socially uncertain woman who marries the brooding widower Maxim de Winter after a whirlwind courtship in Monte Carlo. At Manderley, his magnificent Cornwall estate, she finds herself haunted by the presence of his first wife Rebecca — whose personality still governs the household, personified by the sinister housekeeper Mrs. Danvers. The novel is simultaneously a Gothic romance, a psychological thriller, and a study of obsession, jealousy, and the way a dead woman can possess the living more completely than any living person could. Its opening line — 'Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again' — is among the most famous in English fiction.
What is My Cousin Rachel about?
My Cousin Rachel (1951) is du Maurier's most morally ambiguous novel — narrated by Philip Ashley, a young Cornishman who inherits his older cousin Ambrose's estate after Ambrose dies in Italy, possibly poisoned by his Italian wife Rachel. When Rachel arrives in England, Philip's initial hatred turns to infatuation and eventually to reckless love — but the question of whether Rachel is innocent or guilty is never resolved. The novel is a masterpiece of unreliable narration: everything we know is filtered through Philip's obsessive, self-deceiving consciousness, and du Maurier refuses to tell us what actually happened.
What is Jamaica Inn about?
Jamaica Inn (1936) is du Maurier's most atmospheric adventure novel — set on the wild, fog-bound Cornish moor in the early nineteenth century. Mary Yellan, arriving at Jamaica Inn to live with her aunt, discovers that her uncle Joss Merlyn runs a gang of wreckers who lure ships onto the rocks and murder their crews. The novel is a straightforward Gothic thriller — less psychologically complex than Rebecca or My Cousin Rachel — but its atmosphere (the desolate moor, the brutal inn, the mysterious albino vicar) is magnificent. An excellent starting point for readers who want du Maurier's storytelling excitement without the psychological density of her later work.
