My Cousin Rachel

du Maurier is very quickly becoming one of my favourite authors. Her writing is engaging and reads smoothly, her stories are always gripping and entertaining, and her characters are so enigmatic and almost sinisterly charming.

When Philip Ashley was orphaned as a child, his rich bachelor cousin Ambrose, 18 years older than him, took him under his wing. When Philip turns 21, Ambrose decides he needs a change in weather and goes off on a long continental trip, during which he meets and marries a lady who is distantly related to them - or their cousin Rachel. Slightly more than a year later, Ambrose dies from a brain illness in Florence, Italy, where he had been staying with Rachel. Philip is enraged and resolved to confront Rachel, but is unexpectedly drawn by her kindness and gentility. But is Rachel more complicit in Ambrose's death than she had at first appeared?

Rebecca, which I enjoyed thoroughly (perhaps even slightly more than this one), had a very slow start and it took a while before the reader is plunged into the thick of things. My Cousin Rachel has no such qualms. The action is gripping from the very first page. Rebecca also had a more obviously sinister, creepy vibe to it than this one, whereas the same creepiness in My Cousin Rachel requires some digging and thought, but it's still there.

The beautiful and engaging writing already won me over, but the characterisation of this book is its main attraction. Philip Ashley is quite possibly one of the dumbest main characters I've read in a long time, but yet you can read the childishness, the self-entitlement, and the petulance from Rachel's POV. You can understand why she had no wish to tie herself up to him for life. Rachel, on the other hand, is a beautiful enigma, a play of light and shadows. Is what you're seeing what you're getting? You don't know, and you probably never will know.

Some spoilerish thoughts on Rachel and the ending:
The easy interpretation of this book is to label her a villain, manipulative, cold, and calculating - but I personally think she's so much more than that. I enjoyed how she resisted interpretation and pinning down in all senses of the word. Both Philip and Ambrose were almost driven mad by how they couldn't get her no matter how much they tried. She took their money, it's true, but I don't think either of them would've minded if that had allowed them to pin her down at last. But she refuses to be so. She refuses to even be pinned down by us readers, in that we, like Philip and Ambrose, can never fully understand her intentions or her mind. I feel like that's why the ending of the book is so vague and confusing on first read, especially if, like me, you read it as a mystery novel (and even a bit like Rebecca) where we'll be presented with a nice denouement and all the answers we need with a neat little bow by the end. This isn't the case, and it's deliberately discomfiting. Rachel would sooner die before she is forced to be captured, to be pinned down and account for her actions.

i think i prefer rebecca to this, but it was a good and enticing read nonetheless.

similar to henry james' the turn of the screw, du maurier employs an unreliable narrator tinged with paranoia and ambiguity that leaves the reader unsure of trusting much. like rebecca, the circumstances of a character's death will have you tapping your chin in suspicion, but that is not the only motivation to read this book in one setting.

my only gripes are the narrator and that it was predictably too much like rebecca, although this fact is advertised openly (at least on the copy i own). i found philip ashley absolutely annoying and naïve, despite having been brought up to be otherwise. he reminds me of edith wharton's newland archer from the age of innocence, so to summarise this book was read hoping the narrator would fall from grace in the end. then from the start, i knew who was going to die, and who would be suspected of the murder, which is not what i want out of a mystery novel. but unlike rebecca and more similar to turn of the screw, the ambiguity is stronger in this novel, which might be more appealing to some. personally, i wanted the answer to this whodunnit, and because i didn't get it on top of having to put up with an annoying narrator, i demoted this one to four stars.

perhaps read my cousin rachel before rebecca.

If you are a fan of Daphne du Maurier, you are going to LOVE this book!

Phillip is the heir to the Ashley estate, but he didn't count on his cousin falling in love. He also didn't count on his cousin dying at a young age... and then falling in love with his widow.

As events unfold, and life with Rachel settles down, Phillip finds himself throwing everything he has at her. He wants to make her happy, and he wants to keep her all for himself, but there are more surprises just waiting for him with his cousin Rachel....

Reading this as a middle aged adult is quite a different experience from when I read it as a romantic teenager. This time around I see it as a study of willful self deception intertwined with societal structures that put women in the position of having to beguile men for their security. The character of Philip Ashley starts out as sympathetic, an orphaned boy raised by his benevolent cousin, but quickly becomes insufferably possessive once he develops a fascination for Rachel. In spite of his friends' warnings, he isolates himself and digs deeper into his obsession. Rachel herself may or may not be a danger to him. She certainly leads him on, whether that's because she feels she has to or because she has nefarious purposes is unclear. This is a masterpiece of ambiguity.

List of rachels offenses (assuming she didnt poison anyone)
-spend a lot of money
-want to go back to italy
-not marry phililp
-be friends with an italian dude who is in love with her

List of rachels offenses (assuming she DID poison both)
-spend a lot of money
-want to go back to italy
-not marry phililp
-be friends with an italian dude who is in love with her
-make some dude who tried to murder her and is a general creep sick for a few weeks
-kill her husband who refused to give her money for basic living expenses and questioned her every move


What's most interesting about this book is that the discussion around it centers around whether Rachel was “evil” or not when even assuming the worst of her it's clear she would be the victim in this scenario. It comes easier to people I suppose to forgive a lovesick man than to excuse a woman for not appreciating his advances. Phillip is obsessed with her, constantly is manipulating her to stay and is just a general creep. Not to mention he attempts to murder her and then acts offended she doesn't want to be alone with him after that. Anything Rachel might have done at that point is self defense. So if she did poison him...good for her! Next time up the dosage.

There is no doubt in my mind that this is exactly the point. Whether rachel did poison him or not is irrelevant entirely. At the end of the book phililp is alive and rachel is dead- because of him. And yet he is still self obsessed about whether the woman he killed was deserving of it - and so is the majority of the readers it seems.

We truly do live in a society.

This was a reread for me. I guess I never wrote a review the first time around.

My Cousin Rachel is one of my all-time favorite books. It has the same eeriness as Rebecca while being a completely different plot.

Ambrose and Philip are confirmed bachelors to the point where they don't even keep women on staff. This changes when Ambrose goes to Italy for the winter due to complications with his rheumatism. There, he meets cousin Rachel. In a matter of weeks they are married, turning Philip's world upside down in particular. He never sees his beloved cousin Ambrose again and he is sure Rachel is the one to blame. When word comes that Rachel is coming to England, Philip resents all thoughts of her, hanging onto a bitter image made by Ambrose's last letters to him, but the woman who shows up at his door is the complete opposite. Soon enough, he finds himself as infatuated with her as Ambrose had once been.

I could honestly carry on for paragraphs and recite every step of the plot. This is a book I completely lost myself in several years ago and took months to finish never wanting it to end. I still took my time with this reread (which I chose to listen to on audio, brilliantly narrated by actor Jonathan Pryce) and I love it as much as it did the first time. My mind reels trying to figure out the mystery surrounding Rachel. One of Daphne Du Maurier's finest works without a doubt.

Daphne du Maurier draws up a suspense infused with a million details (that doesn't read like a long, drawn out body of work) which still only manages to weave an ambiguous understanding of whether one had ill intentions over another from the start. It's open to interpretation which will make for great discussion, and it makes for a cozy read on a chilly and rainy afternoon!

Felt like the ending was a little bit of a cop-out, but oh man, I kept expecting certain turns of plot that didn't actually pan out, and instead other things happened, and it felt so dark and melodramatic and psychological and crazy. I kept wanting to yell at Phillip for being a fool and an idiot, in both his obsession/desperation and hypocrisy when it came to Rachel. The audiobook's narrator was spectacular.

Also, I imagined Renaldi to look like the asylum owner from the 1992 Beauty and the Beast, even though he's only described as being middle-aged. The narrator's portrayal of him reminded me so much of that guy, and I have no idea why.