Rebecca

Mrs Danvers is one of those rare characters who has transcended her original setting to enter the wider culture. She has been referenced in novels by Stephen King and Sue Townsend, parodied in films by Mel Brooks and even lent her name to an American all-female pop group. She takes on further life in Rose Tremain’s The Housekeeper, a reimagining of Rebecca that speculates on the inspiration behind Daphne du Maurier’s most compelling creation. Unlike du Maurier, Tremain affords her housekeeper a rich backstory. Now known as Danni, she was born Lilianne Danowski, the daughter of a Jewish tailor in a small Polish town.

‘We can never go back again,’ wrote Daphne du Maurier in her bestselling novel Rebecca (1938). ‘The past is still too close to us.’ Yet back she went, in book after book, to the past of her remarkable family. In 1934, six months after the death of her father, the matinée idol Gerald du Maurier, Daphne wrote his biography, portraying him as a spoilt man-baby with a ‘stable’ of mistresses. Gerald’s own father, George du Maurier, was the celebrated book illustrator and Punch cartoonist whose creation of characters such as Mrs Ponsonby de Tomkyns and Lady Gatheremall skewered the Victorian nouveaux riches.