Set in the days before motorised transport, before railways, when it still took three weeks to travel from south-west England to Florence, this is a historical romance fused with a murder mystery which inevitably reminded me of du Maurier's masterpiece Rebecca.
A young orphan, Philip, the past tense, first person narrator, is adopted and brought up by his bachelor cousin, Ashley. His education includes Harrow and Oxford, but not females. Ashley then travels to Italy and falls in love with and marries another cousin, the eponymous Rachel, who is half-Italian and already a widow. Mysterious and hysterical letters reach Philip in which Ashley says he is ill and blames Rachel. Philip travels to Florence but discovers that Ashley is already dead and Rachel has vanished. Back at home, he is reunited with Rachel ... and falls in love with her. Despite repeated warnings about her, he is determined to marry her and to settle on her the inheritance that Ashley has given him.
The reader is reduced to shouting 'Don't do it' and, like all the other onlookers, watch helplessly as Philip progresses towards self-destruction. Can he come to his senses in time?
It's a classic tale, well told ... but it relies on the suspension of disbelief, specifically that Philip would be so infatuated that, despite warnings, he would do what he does. I just never accepted that. Nor did I accept that those surrounding him who could see what was happening would allow it to happen. Would the godfather have witnessed the deed? Would Louise have remained silent for so long? It simply didn't ring true to me.
I didn't believe in Philip's character. He was a one-dimensional sucker. The only complex characters were those of the villains: Rachel and her Italian adviser Signor Rainaldi. The others are bystanders.
The mystery element of the plot relies on subtle foreshadowing: clues must be provided so that the reader has a fair chance of guessing the ending and yet, by the use of misdirection or red herrings, the reader must be surprised by that ending. In Aristotle's terms (in his Poetics), a twist (he called it 'peripeteia') should be something that defies the reader's expectations and yet can be understood as a necessary outcome of what went before. Du Maurier, however, wants the reader to be in a superior position to the protagonist-narrator, so that the reader can see what is about to happen, so that they can urge the protagonist not to be so stupid, as I did. Therefore, du Maurier needed to make the foreshadowing clues easy to recognise. I did, and I felt this spoiled a lot of the suspense.
Du Maurier expects me to believe that at the end of the book, Philip still has doubts. I didn't, I couldn't. No one, not even someone educated at Harrow and Oxford, could be so stupid.
A nice portrait of a villain but fundamentally flawed.
Selected quotes:
- “No one will ever guess the burden of blame I carry on my shoulders; nor will they know that every day, haunted still by doubt, I ask myself a question which I cannot answer. Was Rachel innocent or guilty?” (Ch 1)
- “The flat stale heat of evening, buried too many hours in the walls and roofs of houses.” (Ch 5)
- “There is nothing so defeating to ease of manner as being uncomfortably seated.” (Ch 8)
- “A halo can be a lovely thing, providing you can take it off, now and again, and become human.” (Ch 10)
I was disappointed. Du Maurier is a great novelist.
September 2026; 335 pages
First published in 1951 by Victor Gollancz
My paperback edition was issued by Virago in 2003
Du Maurier also wrote Jamaica Inn.
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