Word: rebecca
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Readers will not have to dig much farther than this into The King's General to know that Daphne du Maurier has again struck pay dirt in the same lode that produced her best-selling Rebecca and Jamaica Inn. Her new novel (the Literary Guild's January selection) is a hose-and-doublet pageant of the English Civil War (1642 to 1646) for which Miss du Maurier's agent has whispered loudly to Hollywood that $250,000 will do. The chief characters of The King's General are mostly out of English history; .heir lusty, gusty...
...Rebecca West was an actress first, a novelist and critic later. She was born Cicily Isabel Fairfield, in County Kerry. She took the name Rebecca West from a part she played in Ibsen's Rosmersholm; her career came from the fact that she preferred her words to someone else...
...sounded impudent, as when she thumbed her nose, in pungent book reviews, at literary lights like G. B. Shaw and H. G. Wells. The cleverness and impudence matured into eloquence and insight, and in criticism and novels (The Judge, The Return of the Soldier, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon), Rebecca West proved herself one of the most ardently articulate Englishwomen of her time...
...trouble started in the rush of her first success when Dark Victory and Wuthering Heights made it clear that she would soon become a major star. David Selznick wanted her for the title role in Hitchcock's smash Rebecca, but she turned it down. She was under contract to Warner for half of each year; if she worked for Selznick, he would own the other half. She preferred to spend it with her husband, in Ireland. That sort of independence is neither admired nor understood in Hollywood. It didn't exactly enhance her stock, either, when she returned...
Stories Within Stories. The Ballad and the Source is Rebecca's adolescent portrait of Mrs. Jardine. It is a novel of stories within stories. The stories are suggestive, sometimes poignant. One of Mrs. Jardine's novels, it appears, was interpreted as a vindictive portrait of Rebecca's grandmother. Mrs. Jardine's leaving her first husband was apparently a noted scandal of the 1890s, complete with ruined career, resignation from the diplomatic corps, and a midnight attempt by Mrs. Jardine to kidnap their infant daughter Ianthe. When Ianthe was 18 her emancipated mother sent a lover...