Daphne du Maurier · My Cousin Rachel

Author: Daphne du Maurier
Title: My Cousin Rachel
Year of publication: 1951
Page count: 335
Rating: ★★★★

“She has done for me at last, Rachel my torment.”

This is my second Du Maurier novel, and having loved Rebecca as much as I did, I can’t help but compare the two. You’ll find yourself pretty much compelled to do so regardless, because, in a way, My Cousin Rachel is a mirror of her masterpiece: It is also a study in jealousy, but this time, we have a male protagonist and get to see how Du Maurier explores the psychological theme of obsession/obsessive ‘love’ in the other gender. They’re both exquisitely written gothic suspense novels set in Cornwall (although I didn’t find My Cousin Rachel even remotely as atmospheric or haunting as Rebecca), and both protagonists, while widely different in personality, exhibit the same kind of often infuriating naïveté. It’s a testament to Du Maurier’s incredible writing and fleshed out characters that despite Philip, the narrator of this story, often behaving like a petulant, sulky child, and generally being quite self-centered and foolish, I never could actively dislike him all that much. The tension is slow-building, almost unbearably so, but allows for many doubts and suspicions to form in the reader’s mind—there are plenty of little hints and lots of sometimes obvious foreshadowing that I found delightful.

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I personally adored the ending, especially the last line and how it came full circle with the haunting but seemingly out-of-place first chapter, and the fact that the ambiguity in regards to Rachel’s innocence is never resolved. We only ever get to experience Rachel through Philip’s biased eyes, a young man who has virtually no experience around women, having been orphaned young and brought up by his older cousin Ambrose, a bachelor who liked it that way and dismissed the only female staff on his estate when Philip was a young boy. For that reason, I’ll go as far as to say that it has feminist undertones: We will never know if Rachel was the master manipulator and femme fatale the somewhat benevolently misogynistic men who fell in love with her in the story believed her to be, or if she was nothing but a woman mourning her husband. Due to the unreliable narrator, we will never know Rachel’s true motives, but I liked reading a period novel that points to the complete lack of agency possessed by women back then.

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”We were dreamers, both of us, unpractical, reserved, full of great theories never put to test, and like all dreamers, asleep to the waking world. Disliking our fellow men, we craved affection; but shyness kept impulse dormant until the heart was touched. When that happened the heavens opened, and we felt, the pair of us, that we have the whole wealth of the universe to give.”