And here du Maurier is her usual expert self at both instilling alarm and suspense and also at the details. One weird thing I noticed was that the language read in a slightly stilted way I’ve noticed before with DdM which reminds me very much of the translation of Alain-Fournier’s “Le Grand Meaulnes” – more obvious here as it also treats ancient chateaux in the French countryside.

You will need to seriously suspend disbelief for this story as it’s highly implausible and yet it had me intrigued from start to finish. Even when I could not believe that the family members did not realize it was a different man, I was so engrossed in the story that I did not care. I wondered how much further I had to fall, and if the sense of shame that overwhelmed me was merely wallowing in darkness. Don’t know that one Liz but the reading group read the excellent My Cousin Rachel recently and I used Rebecca in a WEA Romantic Novel course. A escrita é muito boa, a autora é mestra em criar tensão e a leitura tornou-se compulsiva, na ânsia de saber o que passaria a seguir e como iria John desembaraçar-se das várias situações que iam surgindo e, sobretudo, de como se iria resolver esta confusão no final.John soon feels he is out of his depth: “ I had plunged into this unknown world like a reckless walker into a morass, each step taking him deeper, each wild flounder committing him more inescapably” [Daphne du Maurier, 1957: 203]. wishing to condemn him, it was as if it was the shadow I condemned, the man who had moved and spoken and acted in his place, and not Jean de Gué at all. Adrian Harrington began trading in 1971, as part of Harrington Brothers in the Chelsea Antiques Market on London's fashionable King's Road. With du Maurier, readers know that they are in the safe and confident hands of a master who will deliver something subtle, unsettling and over and above their expectations. What would they think if they knew he was just a stranger playing at being their son, husband, father, brother, lover or master?

The family in the story is being exposed from a unique position – that of a stranger and an intimate confidant both at the same time. That time might have come, certainly it is very near; because when you go on storing away memories of books, of stories, of characters, it is inevitable that older memories will be pushed further back. Suspecting suicide, John learns from Jean's mother that Françoise knew of Jean's affairs and feared that the family all wanted her out of the way; Marie-Noel's disappearance (an apparent sign that she had turned against Françoise) was the last straw. It is evident that he is travelling through France, where he meets a man who eerily is his double in looks; a confident French count, Jean de Gué. He's a lonely man without a family who is thinking of joining a monastery to find meaning in his life.But, when the story of deception begins, instead of it being suspenseful and intriguing, the whole structure collapses with the story stepping onto unrealistic grounds and taking a monotonous path. But the question that really bugs me is why doesn’t anyone seem to notice that he’s not Jean – not his brother, his mother or even his wife and child? The language is rich and hugely descriptive – all in a good way – and as the tale gallops along more and more problems seem to crawl out of the woodwork. Indeed in her own life, she seems to have had an almost obsessive love for her "Menabilly" the house she rented for so many years.

In some of her novels, however, she went beyond the technique of the formulaic romance to achieve a powerful psychological realism reflecting her intense feelings about her father, and to a lesser degree, her mother. Teacher John Standing, who has just lost his job, meets his doppelgänger Johnny Spence, a failed businessman. I read The Glass-Blowers this week and so was also thinking about The Scapegoat because both are set in the rural countryside.I made an effort to feel some sympathy towards them, just to anchor myself to the story, and succeeded for a time, to direct them towards Francoise (Jean's wife) and Blanche (his sister) who were both utterly wronged by the true Jean de Gue.