Word: rebecca
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...that point it is plain that the famed author of Rebecca has not lost her tricky gift for making the reader hold his breath when literary esthetes tell him he should be holding his nose. To her romantic shopgirl's imagination. Novelist Du Maurier brings a proficiency for making imminent doom race impending revelation neck and neck, chapter by chapter. Loyal fans need only be told that they will be nervous wrecks by the end of The Scapegoat...
...stuffs her novel with eccentric servants, eavesdroppers, potential murders, apparent suicides, strangely worded wills. For a romantic setting there is the 17th century chateau of St. Gilles, not unlike Daphne Du Maurier's own sprawling, 70-room Menabilly House on the Cornish coast, great and gloomy original for Rebecca's legendary Manderley. No reasonable Doppelgänger could wish for an eerier home-away-from-home...
...polo playing, his first marriage to Mary Elizabeth ("Liz") Altemus, and his second to Betsey Gushing Roosevelt, he was combining business and the arts by backing some 30 Broadway plays, e.g., Life With Father, and helping stake Hollywood Producer David O. Selznick in such highly profitable productions as Rebecca and Gone With the Wind...
Dialogues of Dolls. As spelled out by Rebecca West, the tragedy of genius is that there is no way of judging whether it is real or illusory. When father Aubrey, for instance, takes balloons and other airborne things quite seriously, even his best friends fear that he will go round the bend unless he takes a complete rest. Misguided Cordelia, on the other hand, is believed by her schoolteacher to be an infant prodigy. Obsessed with convictions of her own genius, she fiddles madly before audiences of ardent ignoramuses. When at last a tough old professional assures her that...
...fatal weakness is an unnatural and very unmusical style of dialogue. Modeled on Victorian storybooks for young readers (e.g., "Children, is it not about this time that the lapegeria comes out at Kew?"), it makes all the characters, without exception, sound like awkward, clockwork dolls. Too bad, because Rebecca West's descriptions of period colors, clothes, homes and mealtimes recapture the world of half a century ago as brightly as a painted canvas...