“I’ve taken the plunge,” she thought, “and there’s no returning. I’m out for what I can get, and I’ll see that I get it. I’ll pay back in kind, I won’t cheat, I won’t be dishonest. No one will claim I haven’t earned my money. Value given for value received. It’s one trade like another, the butcher, the baker, the candlestick maker. We’ve all got to live.”
Mary Anne is the fictionalized story of Daphne du Maurier’s great-great-grandmother, Mary Anne Clarke. It is quite the rags to riches to (near) rags again saga. Mary Anne is born into poverty and clambers up the social ladder with the tenacity of Becky Sharp. She is conscious from an early age of the disparity of power between men and women and she uses charm, subterfuge, threats, manipulation, bribery, seduction—basically, every trick she has!—to get what she wants, which is not so much money as security, for herself and her family. She loves luxury, she loves power, but at every turn she learns how fast she can lose her grip on both. Like Becky, she never stops, and also stops at nothing, fighting to keep them. Many powerful men enlist her in their own schemes, but they usually betray the promises they make her; it’s hard to feel any pity for them when they find themselves, in turn, exposed or betrayed for Mary Anne’s own purposes.
The pinnacle of Becky’s career is her presentation to the Prince Regent. Mary Anne goes one better, becoming the mistress of his brother Frederick, Duke of York. The chief engine of the plot from this point on is her participation in a scheme to profit through his influence over military appointments and promotions. This eventually becomes a huge public scandal, with hearings in the House of Commons; Frederick eventually is driven to resign his position as Commander in Chief. By this time he has severed his connection with Mary Anne, who gets her revenge by being the chief witness against him; she goes on to publish pamphlets and memoirs, which I assume were key primary sources for du Maurier’s novel (I would like to know how many of the letters and speeches in them come directly from contemporary materials). 
Mary Anne has little of the lush atmospheric writing of Jamaica Inn or Frenchman’s Creek, or the delicious suspense of My Cousin Rachel or Rebecca. It has its own energy, though: like its protagonist, it just keeps moving forward, restlessly, relentlessly, on to the next thing, and the next, and the next. Mary Anne’s father lets the family down; she picks up the work. Mary Anne’s husband turns out to be a weak drunken fool; she figures out how to support the family. When there seem to be no better options, she “takes the plunge” and becomes a courtesan; when the opportunity arises, she wins the Duke’s favour and works tirelessly to keep it, even though the allowance he gives her is not enough to meet his expectations and (again like Becky) she looks to be winning the game even as she is getting deeper and deeper into debt. When her royal “protector” cuts her off, she just keeps going. She is not particularly likeable and she’s certainly not admirable, but I couldn’t help rooting for her. All those men, for one thing: they just use her and lie to her and break their promises and go home to their wives and then sit in judgment on her.
Mary Anne isn’t just plot points, though: there are passages that definitely have that du Maurier flare. Here’s her description of the back streets of London where Mary Anne grows up, for example:
The streets were mentor and playground, teacher and companion. Rascals picked pockets on the streets, beggars were given alms, goods were bought, rubbish was sold, men laughed, men cursed, women whined, women smiled, children died under wheels. Some men and women wore fine clothes, some wore rags. The first ate well, and the others starved. The way to avoid rags and starvation was to watch, to wait, to pick up the coin dropped on the pavement before anyone else, to run swiftly, to conceal quickly, to smile at the right moment, to hide at the next, to keep what you had, to look after your own. The thing to remember was not to grow up like her mother, who was weak, who had no resistance, who was lost in this world of London that was alien to her, and whose only consolation was to talk of the past, when she had known better days.
Right there we can see the lessons Mary Anne remembered for the rest of her life and her determination to do whatever she can not to be weak, which means having money: “Not money to pinch,” as she later reflects, “but money to spend.”
And here she is at the end of her own “better days,” bathed in the pathos of someone who has played and lost, but still too game to be pathetic:
I remember . . . Then she’d stop herself. The young are bored with reminiscences. Who minded whether dandies in Vauxhall had stood on tip-toe once to watch her pass? What did it matter if a gaping crowd had climbed her carriage-wheels in Palace Yard? Or that she’d queened it in the House of Commons, the only woman in that world of men? . . . But sometimes, in the night, and no one with her, a strange nostalgic yearning came for the past; and baffled by the silence, oddly lonely, a church clock in Boulogne chiming the hour, she thought, “There’s no one left who gives a damn. The world I knew has gone. This is tomorrow.”
That’s splendid stuff.
Novel Readings 