“Last night I dreamed I saw Daphne again” opens this startling prequel to Daphne du Maurier’s classic 1938 gothic novel Rebecca. The narrator Danni – inspiration in Rose Tremain’s audacious reimagining for Rebecca’s Manderley housekeeper, Mrs Danvers – has been given her own voice, and The Housekeeper is her act of literary revenge.
It is 1936, and Lilianne Danowski – a Polish-Jewish refugee known to her employers as Danni – is housekeeper at Manderville Hall, Cornwall. When Daphne du Maurier visits, Danni is tasked with showing her around the estate. The writer dazzles the housekeeper, yet appears eager to trespass, greedy for the “closed and shuttered places in other people” that she wants to “prise open”. Manderville Hall is exquisitely drawn. “I could already steal so much from his house,” du Maurier says, and proceeds to do precisely that.
Danni and du Maurier soon embark on a clandestine affair, in which du Maurier is presented as sexually sadistic, callous and selfish. She is childish and petulant, demanding the housekeeper is constantly available to her in the boathouse at the cove, yet when the lovers are discovered during a costume ball, the housekeeper finds herself cruelly set aside. She is forced to leave her post. Du Maurier, fearful of exposure as a bisexual, disappears to Alexandria. There she will write Rebecca, in which Lilianne Danowski is remade into one of literature’s most notoriously deceitful and malicious housekeepers, Mrs Danvers.
Danni’s Jewishness – and the “othering” of her that it produces – provides Danni with an understanding of the impossibility of true acceptance. Her love affair with du Maurier is doomed to failure because it is so deeply problematic. Both it and she (in her Jewishness) are forbidden. Tremain deftly draws a parallel here with the efforts of Jewish communities to assimilate back in Danni’s native Poland, which Danni believes were doomed because the Jews are fated never to be fully accepted for who they are. Du Maurier is presented as unable to reconcile herself with who she is; when she kills off Rebecca in her novel, she kills off the bisexual part of herself. Having read of du Maurier’s Mrs Danvers, who crawls “like a reptile” through Rebecca, Danni is disgusted, believing du Maurier secretly sees her as a Jew who had seduced her away from “her Christian marriage”.
Du Maurier may have stolen Manderville and its Danni very successfully, yet in The Housekeeper we see that du Maurier is so self-entitled and fixated on success that she has not noticed she has underestimated her spurned lover. The Housekeeper is an extraordinary novel, an audacious counter-attack about a woman who challenges du Maurier’s warning here that “writers are dictators”. Lilianne Danowski will not be dictated to. Instead she exposes the things the great writer wishes to remain hidden and, in doing so, steals her character back.
The Housekeeper, by Rose Tremain, is published by Chatto and Windus
To get more from Life, click here to sign up for our free Life newsletter.