The Housekeeper by Rose Tremain review – a bloodless origin story for Du Maurier’s Rebecca

The novelist has expanded her devastating 2014 short story about an imagined affair between Daphne du Maurier and a fictional Polish-Jewish housekeeperThe 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 Ma…

≈