Category: HF Reading Challenge

Book Review – The Housekeeper by Rose Tremain

whatcathyreadnextLeave a comment

About the Book

Mrs Danowski – known as Danni – is the housekeeper of a grand mansion on the wild coast of Cornwall. When glamorous young writer Daphne du Maurier visits Manderville Hall to research her new novel, she and Danni are drawn into a clandestine and intoxicating affair.

For Danni, it is an all-consuming love; for Daphne a submission to long-suppressed desires. But their fragile secret is vulnerable to prying eyes and destined for heartbreak. When Daphne’s novel launches to triumphant success, Danni is distraught to find herself transformed into a malign and jealous character on the page. She seeks respite from the hurt by telling her own story: The Housekeeper.

Format: Hardcover (320 pages) Publisher: Chatto & Windus
Publication date: 17th September 2026 Genre: Historical Fiction

Find The Housekeeper on Goodreads

Purchase The Housekeeper from Bookshop.org [Disclosure: If you buy books linked to our site, we may earn a commission from Bookshop.org, whose fees support independent bookshops]

My Review

My experience with Rose Tremain’s novels has been mixed. I enjoyed her 2021 novel Lily, a historical mystery set in 19th century London, but wasn’t as enamoured with Absolutely & Forever as the judges of the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction obviously were, since they shortlisted it in 2024. However given Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier is one of my all-time favourite books, I couldn’t resist the idea of a novel exploring the back story of one of its most enigmatic characters, Manderley’s housekeeper Mrs Danvers.

Many years ago I came across a copy of Daphne du Maurier’s book, The Rebecca Notebook & Other Memories. In her chapter on Rebecca, she describes how during the course of writing the book the character of Mrs Danvers became more sinister, noting ‘Why, I have no idea’.

In The Housekeeper, Rose Tremain provides an answer to that question, namely that it was the result of the breakdown of a passionate affair between Daphne du Maurier and the housekeeper of Manderville Hall, Mrs Danowski, known as Danni. Danni is the author’s fictional creation but the book borrows much from the real life of Daphne du Maurier, such as the fact she had affairs with women.

I very much enjoyed the back story the author creates for Danni. Brought up in Poland in a Jewish family, she is shunned and subjected to abuse by her schoolmates. Her instinct becomes to hide her true feelings, leaving her something of an outsider. Tutored by her tailor father, her skills as a dressmaker eventually bring her to the attention of Lady Edwina Grenville-Whithers, owner of Manderville Hall where she takes up the role of housekeeper. Danni was devoted to Edwina, her role becoming more like personal maid and confidante rather than merely supremely efficient housekeeper. But now Edwina is dead and Lord Grenville-Whithers, known as Perry, is grief-stricken and the future of Mandeville Hall now uncertain because there is no direct heir. Enter Daphne du Maurier to further disrupt life at Mandeville Hall.

Within seconds of their meeting, Danni feels a strong physical attraction to Daphne. It’s reciprocated and in the blink of an eye they’re in a full-on sexual relationship. I must admit I found the speed with which their relationship developed rather implausible. As Danni relates it – because we only ever hear her side of the story – their relationship allows Daphne to free the ‘boy’ within her and achieve complete sexual satisfaction, something she assures Danni she doesn’t experience with her husband, Frederick Browning. (Incidentally his nickname was ‘Boy’.). Daphne is a demanding and voracious lover, seeking to monopolise any spare moment of Danni’s time to ‘wax’, Daphne’s rather cloying term for having sex. When Daphne believes she has been betrayed by Danni she responds in an act of literary revenge and, fearing that their relationship may damage her reputation should it become public, shuns Danni completely.

My main issue with the book was the way the author chose to characterise Daphne du Maurier, a real person. I would have felt far more comfortable if the novel had explored the intimate relationship between Mrs Danvers and Rebecca some feel is hinted at in du Maurier’s book. Would I be alone in thinking Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys, which expands on the character of Bertha Mason, Mr Rochester’s first wife in Jane Eyre, is preferable to a novel which imagines Charlotte Brontë having an affair with a woman who, when it ends badly, is immortalised as the ‘madwoman in the attic’ of her most well-loved book? (I hope I haven’t given an author an idea there…)

In case this sounds as if I disliked The Housekeeper, there were many aspects of the book I loved. I thought Perry was a wonderful character and found his grief at Edwina’s death intensely moving. I also felt the story developed in interesting ways following Danni’s departure from Manderville Hall. In fact, some aspects made the relationship between Danni and Daphne more believeable in retrospect.

There are many echoes of Rebecca in the book from the location of Daphne and Danni’s trysts to the costume ball during which a pivotal event occurs. Tremain also refashions the famous first line of Rebecca, ‘Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again’. As the fictional Daphne ruefully admits, writers are ‘terrible thieves and pickpockets’.

I received an advance reader copy courtesy of Chatto & Windus via NetGalley.

In three words: Intense, atmospheric, intriguing
Try something similar: Estella’s Revenge by Barbara Havelocke

About the Author

Rose Tremain‘s novels and short stories have been published in thirty countries and have won many awards, including the Orange Prize (The Road Home), the Dylan Thomas Award (The Colonel’s Daughter and Other Stories), the Whitbread Novel of the Year (Music & Silence) the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and France’s Prix Femina (Sacred Country), and the South Bank Sky Arts Award (The Gustav Sonata). Her novel Absolutely and Forever (2023) was a Sunday Times Book of the Year.

Rose Tremain was made a CBE in 2007 and a Dame in 2020. She lives in Norfolk and London with the biographer, Richard Holmes. (Photo/bio: Publisher website)

Book Review – The Newer World by Sebastian Barry @FaberBooks

whatcathyreadnext2 Comments

About the Book

I knew as I made my way home that there was no home. All the old things . . . were gone forever.

Against the rapidly shifting landscape of post Civil War America, Tennyson Bouguereau – freed man, devoted brother, nascent singer, conflicted soldier and wanted man – journeys to find meaning and belonging.

From the relative safety of home in Tennessee with his sister Rosalee, he is offered the possibility of a whole new life in Nashville, until a surprising trip to Victorian England changes everything.

Format: Hardback (272 pages) Publisher: Faber & Faber
Publication date: 10th September 2026 Genre: Historical Fiction

Find The Newer World on Goodreads

Purchase The Newer World from Bookshop. org [Disclosure: If you buy books linked to our site, we may earn a commission from Bookshop.org, whose fees support independent bookshops]

My Review

In The Newer World Sebastian Barry returns to the characters who first appeared in Days Without End, which won the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction 2017, and its sequel, A Thousand Moons.

Days Without End told the story of Thomas McNulty and John Cole, whilst A Thousand Moons continued their story but from the point of view of Winona, the orphaned Indian girl they adopted. Our narrator in this book is the wonderfully named Tennyson Bouguereau, a freed man living with his twin sister Rosalee on a small Tennessee farm owned by Lige Magan. Also living there now are Thomas and John, who both served with Lige in the army, and their daughter Winona. Although The Newer World can be read as a standalone it does overlap with events in the earlier books. Personally, I found myself wishing I’d had time to reread the first two books before reading this one to refresh my memory about how they intersect.

In Tennyson Bouguereau, the author has once again created a distinctive and unforgettable narrative voice. As he sets out to recount the story of his life, he warns, ‘I’m not going to tell you just a pretty story. I will give you the actual matters.’ So we learn of his tragic family history, the cruelty endured by enslaved people and that being freed doesn’t bring an end to hatred, bigotry and violence. That deference remains a way to divert attention from yourself, although even that is not necessarily a guarantee of safety, as he discovers.

Following the outcome of a violent attack on the farm, Tennyson is forced to flee for his life. He receives a lifeline from an enlightened lawyer in the form of a place at a college for black freedmen and women in Nashville. There he meets George, a fellow student and ex-soldier who takes Tennyson under his wing. He also meets a young woman, Minnie, who captures his heart. As members of the college’s choir Tennyson, George and Minnie travel the country performing the songs sung in the fields by slaves. Eventually the choir travels to England where audiences greet their performances with acclaim rather than the hostility they experience in America.

‘Then noise, noise never heard before, not just like that, those held-in lungs now filled again with air, everywhere arms were raised, human persons embracing, now one hat thrown into the air, now a hundred, now a thousand, a stampede of cries, the hats turning in the half-darkness and seeming to float in those weird new seconds without clocks, such shouts thrown upward after them, wild sparks of freedom, a brimming fire of joy.’

Tennyson’s friendship with George will last for decades and inform many of Tennyson’s life choices. Together they share many experiences, both good and bad.

Tennyson’s life is one shaped by external events which on many occasions leave him feeling adrift. Rosalee’s letters are infrequent and because of his itinerant lifestyle he often learns of events long after they have taken place. He aches to return to the farm and to Rosalee, but is fearful of the consequences. Even if he does make it back what will he find? In fact, is there such a thing as ‘home’ for him anymore?

I was completely absorbed by Tennyson’s story. I really loved the sense of a man looking back on his life and reflecting on both the good and the bad points with insight and a degree of equanimity.

‘No one admires an old man – an old man is for the muckheap. But, granting that, there isn’t a living child that will not be old by and by. It’s the by and by that confounds you, how quick that comes. And all the things that bothered you and hampered your gait when you were young, they begin to seem like vanished riches. […] We have got our sole legend, our passage through, our mark we left on the path, where we stubbed our toes, where we broke things off. So I guess that’s old man’s riches, what he has got anyhow.’

It’s possible The Newer World is a finale to the trilogy and, if so, it’s a fitting one that has immersed the reader in the lives of very different characters. However, there’s enough in the final pages to make me think the story needn’t necessarily end here.

I received an advance reader copy courtesy of Faber & Faber via NetGalley.

In three words: Powerful, moving, evocative

About the Author

Sebastian Barry was born in Dublin in 1955. The 2018-2021 Laureate for Irish Fiction, his novels have twice won the Costa Book of the Year award, the Independent Booksellers Award and the Walter Scott Prize. He had two consecutive novels shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, A Long Long Way (2005) and the top ten bestseller The Secret Scripture (2008), and has also won the Kerry Group Irish Fiction Prize, the Irish Book Awards Novel of the Year and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize.

He lives in County Wicklow. (Photo: Publisher author page)