However, all too often she’s dismissed as a writer of benign historical romances. Darkness comes to the fore in her macabre and chilling short stories, but also twists through each of her novels. Are his suspicions justified? Is she guilty or innocent? The reader, like Philip, is never quite sure.ĭu Maurier excelled at evoking a sense of menace. “The Menace,” du Maurier explains in her short story of the same title, “in movie language, and especially among women, means a heart-throb, a lover, someone with wide shoulders and no hips.” It’s a term that, for her, referred to sexual attraction – “being ‘menaced,’” du Maurier’s biographer Margaret Forster explains, “was being attracted by another person.” This take on sexual allure, as something tinged with a frisson of danger and threat, lies at the heart of Philip’s attraction to Rachel: evidence suggests Rachel murdered her husband Ambrose, Philip’s beloved uncle. Missing is the menace of the original, and I use this word thoughtfully.
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