Rose Tremain's The Housekeeper Rewrites the Origins of Rebecca

Rose Tremain's 17th novel, The Housekeeper, reimagines the events that might have inspired Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca — and it does so through an affair between Du Maurier and a fictional Polish-Jewish housekeeper.

The book pays homage to Du Maurier's classic by constructing a possible origin story for its villain. Tremain first explored the idea in a 2014 short story, also titled The Housekeeper, included in her acclaimed collection The American Lover. The new novel expands that earlier piece of work into a full-length narrative.

Who is Lilianne Danowski?

The protagonist, both in the 2014 story and the new novel, is Lilianne Danowski, a Polish Jew who fled the pogroms with her father as a child. She presides with reserved efficiency over a large staff at Manderville Hall near Fowey in Cornwall.

Her employers know her as Danni — Danowski, the source notes, was "a mouthful of fishbones." The detail captures the class dynamics Tremain works with: the housekeeper is close enough to run the household, distant enough to have her name smoothed for convenience.

What happens when Du Maurier comes to lunch?

When Du Maurier visits the house, Danowski is deputised to show her around. She proudly encourages the writer to look through the clothes in her dead mistress's fastidiously maintained bedroom. She takes her down to the boathouse — a location that carries obvious weight for any reader of Rebecca.

After a passionate year-long affair between the two women, Danowski will be twisted into the malevolent Mrs Danvers, the housekeeper who haunts Manderley in Du Maurier's 1938 novel.

Where does the book sit in a wider pattern?

The Guardian's review places The Housekeeper in a long tradition of novels that began as short stories. The examples cited include:

• Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway in Bond Street, published two years before Mrs Dalloway — Clarissa Dalloway shopped for gloves in the story before shopping for flowers in the novel.
• Evan S Connell's Mrs Bridge and Jeffrey Eugenides's The Virgin Suicides, both of which began as stories in the Paris Review.
• Rachel Cusk's story Project, published in the New Yorker in September 2025, which serves almost word for word as the opening of her new novel, Life of M.

Tremain's move from story to novel follows the same pattern — expansion, but with a literary pedigree that stretches back through a century of fiction.

Is the expansion a success?

The Guardian's verdict is blunt: the review's headline calls the book "a bloodless origin story" for Rebecca. The critic credits the devastating power of the original 2014 story while questioning what the novel-length version adds.

The judgment matters because Tremain's source material was widely praised. The American Lover, the collection containing the original story, drew strong reviews on publication in 2014.

Readers can now judge for themselves whether the expansion earns its length — and whether Mrs Danvers gains anything from having her backstory filled in.