I heard her go upstairs, and I sat down and stared into the library fire. It seemed to me that if there was any bitterness left in the house it did not come from her, nor from Ambrose, but was a seed deep in my own heart, which I should never tell her of and she need never know. The old sin of jealousy I thought buried and forgotten was with me once again. But this time I was jealous, not of Rachel, but of Ambrose, whom hitherto I had known and loved best in the whole world.
Philip Ashley lives under the care of his older cousin, Ambrose. They are as physically alike as they are mentally: a pair of tall bachelors living in a kind of masculine paradise. That is, until Ambrose falls in love with a mysterious woman named Rachel during a sojourn in Florence, where he marries. The letters he sends back to Philip are entirely enamored, then desperate, even crazed--then word comes that Ambrose has died. Philip, having been bereft of his closest friend and idol, vows to hate Rachel, whom he suspects of driving Ambrose to his death. But when Rachel shows up at the Ashley estate, she's all together different from what he expected, not a sinister hag but a beautiful woman with a sharp sense of humor. As he begins to see in her what Ambrose saw, so clearly Philip begins to resemble Ambrose to Rachel. Soon he is--wouldn't you know it--deeply in love, but the question remains, which Rachel is the true one and which the false? Was he deceived when he thought her to be a cold and calculating killer--or is it the charming widow who is the deception?
My Cousin Rachel is even more tightly plotted than Rebecca (which, let's admit, relies on a lot of turgid unveiling at the end) and more ambiguous in its implications. I almost don't want to detail the plot too much, because to describe the book too much would be to give away its emotional upheavals. Suffice to say, du Maurier is deft in getting us to fall in love with Rachel, too. The first flirtations between the twenty-something boy and the widow in her mid-thirties are--I have to admit--incredibly erotic. When the "twist" happens, which is not so much a twist as something telegraphed clearly to us as it isn't to the callow, headstrong Philip, the change in the book's emotional tenor is so strong that it left me feeling almost physically sick. What I wasn't expecting was that du Maurier would twist that around again, so that we pass from one certainty to another into a kind of state teetering in apprehension. These "twists" are less plot revelations than sea changes in the book's emotional valence, and our attitude toward Rachel; and though the novel leads to a grand Gothic conclusion it also ends up in a place where Rachel is even richer for being perhaps both of the women we have suspected her to be.
That's all very vague, but I don't want to spoil anything, because I'd hate to deny anyone the chance to be experience My Cousin Rachel as it was meant to be read. I found it impossible to put down--in a class with Rebecca and my personal favorite, The Scapegoat. In the final balance, I wonder if it might be read as a subversive story about the legal and financial restrictions experienced by women. Ambrose's suspicion for, then pity for, Rachel relies on the fact that Ambrose wrote out, but failed to sign, a will that would leave his estate to her rather than Philip (who in turn becomes Rachel's heir). If Rachel is conniving, is it a way of carving out an independence in a world that keeps women under the paternalistic care of men? How should we read Rachel's "transformation" of the worn-down, hypermasculine Ashley home into a civilized Italianate estate? It's tempting to read it as a straightforward Eve-and-the-apple story, by which a woman (and an Italian, no less) infects a male Eden. More interesting, I think, to embrace the more complex version of Rachel that emerges at the end.
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