No one will ever guess the burden of blame I carry on my shoulders; nor will they know that every day, haunted still by doubt, I ask myself a question which I cannot answer. Was Rachel innocent or guilty? Maybe I shall learn that, too, in purgatory.
My Cousin Rachel is more understated than Jamaica Inn but, in its own way, it is just as perfect. It’s not just Philip Ashley, our narrator, who will never be able to answer his question about Rachel, but all of us, left by du Maurier suspended in uncertainty and thus in our judgment of Philip himself. Has he heroically resisted and survived one of the women his godfather warns him about, those who “impel disaster”? Or has his own suspicious misogyny made him not a hero, not a victim, but a villain himself? “She was my first, and last,” he tells us, but has his inexperience made him vulnerable to her wiles or liable to fevered obsession and delusions?
Jamaica Inn is romantic suspense: is there a name for this genre of not-knowing? And what other novels besides The Turn of the Screw belong to it? For a long time I felt sure that the verdict would go against Rachel, both because the circumstances of Ambrose’s death certainly seemed suspicious and because the novel seemed tilted against women’s power to disrupt men’s bluff tranquility. Then it dawned on me, rather belatedly, that I was taking Philip too much at his word, or at least taking his point of view too much for granted, something he had, after all, warned me about right at the beginning! It wasn’t until he had his hands around Rachel’s throat, though, that I really saw how du Maurier had suckered me into complacency with the familiar trope of the femme fatale. I just assumed I knew who — or rather what — she really was. But it’s a much more clever game du Maurier’s playing than, say, Braddon’s in Lady Audley’s Secret: there, we figure out quite soon that Lucy is not as she seems, and the suspense comes from seeing who wins the cat-and-mouse game between her and Robert Audley. That’s what I thought would happen here too — that Rachel’s malevolence would become clear and Philip would somehow have to fight and expose it — but how much less fun and original that would have been than what du Maurier does instead. “She may be innocent,” says Philip’s friend and ally Louise; “she may be guilty. You can do nothing.”
And du Maurier really does a lot of things well, provided you don’t mind a little melodrama along with your foreshadowing. I did think (if it’s not heresy to say so about a writer as skillful as du Maurier) that the balance was a little off: it seemed to take a very long time for Philip to emerge from his initial infatuation and thus for things to get really interesting. In the end, I still like Jamaica Inn better, mostly for Mary Yellan but also for its greater plottiness (is that a word?) and its more expansive descriptions, especially of the landscape. But the opening and closing are particularly shivery and splendid here, and frame the story perfectly:
They used to hang men at Four Turnings in the old days.
Not any more, though.
Novel Readings 
For your not-knowing genre consideration: Picnic at Hanging Rock.
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Aha – thanks for reminding me! I keep meaning to read that and then forgetting.
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in this lone case, it’s the movie (Picnic at Hanging Rock) that’s the real gem.
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This is my favorite of the du Maurier novels I’ve read. The ambiguity of it is so delicious and the truth is so impossible to work out. That last line gave me such a chill.
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“My Cousin Rachel is more understated than Jamaica Inn but, in its own way, it is just as perfect.” Well, if you say it is “perfect,” then I have only one option: read the book. And I look forward to it. But how does it “stack up” to Rebecca?
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Very different to Rebecca but just as haunting in its own way.
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Well, in Rebecca, you know absolutely, positively that Rebecca was evil was the villain of the piece. In My Cousin Rachel, there is just that seed of doubt that will never go away.
du Maurier was truly amazing! Nobody around today who equal her.
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My mother, Cornelia Brinkman, translated My Cousin Rachel into Dutch in 1952.
For those of you know Dutch, here’s a website about her: http://www.corneliabrinkman.nl
On this page, you’ll find her translations: http://corneliabrinkman.nl/Vertalingen.htm
I’ve included a trailer from the film My Cousin Rachel, with Olivia de Havilland and Richard Burton.
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Thank you for this! How fascinating.
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Today is International Womens Day. I therefore declare that it is quite clear that the fault lies with both Ambrose and Philip. Tumors, paranoia, fantasies all fed the foolish minds they inhabited with doubt. Rachel was no saint…an opportunist, surely. But Philip was a nut case flitting from one obsessive idea to the next. Had he been patient and clever, he could have had Rachel and a delicious life. Instead he killed her. And he deserved to suffer forever!
No, there is no doubt. The women of the world are the saner sex.
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Very well put! But women can be obsessive screwballs too.
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