“She has done for me at last, Rachel, my torment.” Philip sets off posthaste, but arrives too late: Ambrose is dead. He writes he is constantly watched by his wife and her “friend” and lawyer, Rainaldi. Things immediately take a dark turn Ambrose’s health fails. It’s an outright shock when he writes soon after that he has married her.
So it comes as a surprise when Ambrose, who has traveled to Florence, begins sending missives home to Philip about the widowed Contessa Rachel Sangalletti, a distant cousin. Adamantly opposed to the interference of females, his household is all-male, even the dogs – a contented, testosterone-tinged world. Ambrose is the very best of replacement parents.
In the early Victorian era, Philip Ashley is an orphan, raised by his older cousin, Ambrose, on an estate in Cornwall. Du Maurier chose to make her protagonist male, and the inversion offers some interesting corollaries. It is this worldly male who has all the secrets, serving an almost pedagogical function for the poor young woman as she makes her way through the formulas inherent in Gothic plotting.
My Cousin Rachel is unique in that it takes one of the primary tenets of Gothicism and flips it: Gothic novels usually feature a young, naïve heroine – her youth and inexperience put her at a decided disadvantage when dealing with the older, romantic hero/anti-hero. That first pre-teen encounter happened to be My Cousin Rachel (Victor Gollancz UK, 1951 / Doubleday US, 1952). From my first encounter, I wanted to devour everything she had written, novel and short story. By the time I discovered her, she had long since aged out of bestseller status, known to most only through Hitchcock’s adaptations of her work (e.g., Rebecca, The Birds). In my personal canon of Gothic literature, Daphne du Maurier is one of the greater saints. My Cousin Rachel: The Beauty of Ambiguity Olivia de Havilland and Richard Burton in My Cousin Rachel.
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