The rollcall of notable novels that began life as short stories is surprisingly long and various. Two years before Clarissa Dalloway famously shopped for flowers in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway she was shopping for gloves in Woolf’s short story Mrs Dalloway in Bond Street; Evan S Connell’s Mrs Bridge and Jeffrey Eugenides’s The Virgin Suicides began life as stories published in the Paris Review. Rachel Cusk’s story Project, which ran in the New Yorker in September 2025, serves almost word for word as the opening for her new novel, Life of M.
The newest addition to that list is Rose Tremain’s 17th novel, The Housekeeper, which pays homage to Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca by imagining the events that might have inspired it. Tremain first explored the idea in a 2014 story, also called The Housekeeper and included in her acclaimed collection The American Lover. Her protagonist, then and now, is Lilianne Danowski, a Polish Jew who fled the pogroms with her father as a child and who presides with reserved efficiency over a large staff at Manderville Hall near Fowey in Cornwall. When Du Maurier comes to lunch, it is Danowski, known to her employers as Danni (Danowski was “a mouthful of fishbones”), who is deputised to show her around the house, who proudly encourages Du Maurier to look through the clothes in her dead mistress’s fastidiously maintained bedroom and takes her down to the boat house. It is Danowski who, after a passionate year-long affair with Du Maurier, will be twisted into the malevolent Mrs Danvers.
The married Du Maurier was violently attracted to women: her complicated, deeply closeted attitude towards her own sexuality lends Rebecca much of its darkly erotic charge. In the 2014 story, Tremain echoes that tension, offering, with her impeccable instinct for period, a masterclass in 1930s restraint. Danni is quite undone by Du Maurier, her careful armour torn away, yet bound, like the butler Stevens in Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day, by the long habit of discretion; so she proves a tight-lipped narrator. Danni is the supplicant, the vessel; she knows she has no power. When Du Maurier, terrified of exposure, simply cuts her off, Danni scrabbles for ways to excuse her, to cling to what they shared. It is the discovery, more than a year later, that Du Maurier has immortalised her as the bitter and conniving Mrs Danvers, “ugly and diseased with jealousy”, that devastates her, smashing to pieces her passionately hoarded memories.
What moves a writer to return to a finished story after a decade, to rework it on the larger canvas of the novel? In Tremain’s case it was her story becoming a film. The Housekeeper, starring Anthony Hopkins and Helena Bonham Carter, is slated for upcoming release; Tremain wrote the screenplay.
“Last night I dreamed I saw Daphne again,” Danni declares as the novel opens, recalling one of the most celebrated first lines in literature. Rebecca itself is, of course, part of a complex interplay of gothic novels, from Jane Eyre to Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea, each book shifting the reader’s understanding of the others. Tremain’s novel abounds with references to Rebecca and Du Maurier – Daphne even confesses to Danni her fear that swooping gulls might take them for prey and attack them – but its greater scope gives it none of Rebecca’s subversive complexity. Instead, the story has fattened, its devastating reserve giving way to something softer and less substantial. Peripheral characters, evoked with discomfiting economy in Tremain’s original story, swell into caricature: Lord de Whithers, Danni’s terse, dismissive employer, becomes bumbling Lord Grenville-Whithers, kindly little boy lost, while his self-absorbed niece solidifies into a screaming harpy. Danni’s dead father is recalled in aphorisms more akin to fortune cookies than philosophy. More critically, the exquisite tension between Daphne and Danni, themselves echoes of the formidable Rebecca and the drab, shadowy second Mrs de Winter, fails to hold. With pages to play with, Tremain takes us deep inside their affair but, although this Danni tells all, the scenes remain curiously bloodless: hands and lips and tongues but no fire, no heart. Du Maurier famously called Rebecca “a study in jealousy”, but the lurching sense of malignity and darkness that gave that novel its vertiginous tension is missing here. Without it, Daphne’s final terrible betrayal of Danni feels like petty spite.
“What am I to do with you, Danni? How am I to make you come alive?” Daphne demands teasingly in The Housekeeper’s opening pages. Du Maurier, of course, faced just that problem with Rebecca and pulled it off spectacularly, creating a woman of such toweringly vengeful, transgressive authority that, even in death, she rises up to dominate the book. Tremain has done the opposite. By stripping her Danni of her fierce, quiet dignity, she has robbed her of her power.
• The Housekeeper by Rose Tremain is published by Chatto & Windus (£20). To support the Guardian buy a copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
