Rating: 5 out of 5

As with Rebecca, the only other Du Maurier book I’ve read, the descriptive powers are incredibly transportive. I found the beginning a little bit hard to get to grips with but was then immersed into the tale. It’s a book that benefits from the reader being able to sit and read it in chunks, rather than bits and pieces as it feels like it has more depth that way. It also feels like it would benefit from a second reading. Maybe soon. A wonderful book.
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Read again after seeing the film version. There were some aspects of the film that I didn’t recognise so wanted to refresh my memory. It still left me wondering. But again was transportive.

Highlighted passages:

who is doing the poisoning, the corrupting, here? Is it Rachel, with her tisanas and witchy herbal pharmacoepia, or is it the Ashleys, with their conditional gifts of jewels, land, houses, money and status?

‘I love the stillness of a room, after a party. The chairs are moved, the cushions disarranged, everything is there to show that people enjoyed themselves; and one comes back to the empty room happy that it’s over, happy to relax and say, ‘Now we are alone again.’

on jealousy and dubious maths

‘That spoilt boy, I told myself, always writing letters to him, which I may say he would read extracts from, but never show. That boy who has no faults, but all the virtues. That boy who understands him, when I fail. That boy who holds three-quarters of his heart, and all the best of him. While I hold one-third, and all the worst. Oh, Philip …’ She broke off, and smiled again at me. ‘Good God,’ she said, ‘you talk of jealousy. A man’s jealousy is like a child’s, fitful and foolish, without depth. A woman’s jealousy is adult, which is very different.’

Then my godfather remarked in his gruff deep voice, ‘Tell me, Mrs Ashley, does not Philip remind you very much of Ambrose?’ There was a moment’s silence. She put down her napkin on the table. ‘So much so,’ she said, ‘that I have wondered, sitting here at dinner, if there is any difference.’

At a plot level, she will tease the reader with the question of laburnum seeds, and whether or not Rachel brews them up in her tisanas to rid herself of a husband or a lover; but in counter-point, at a thematic level, she examines male-administered poisons that are equally deadly, and whose victims are more numerous. Yet this, the central mirroring device of the novel, has scarcely been noticed, let alone examined.

Originally posted to my Goodreads account