Literary Landscapes: Daphne du Maurier's Manderley

 

I wanted to do a quick update and I thought a Literary Landscapes post was the best way to do it. These two houses were Daphne du Mauriere's inspiration for Manderley, the ancestral stately home of the de Winters in Rebecca. In my humble opinion (I read the book for the first time a few weeks ago), Manderley is pretty much one of the novel's most vital ingredients. It's bigger than everyone else in the book, and they almost exist simply to keep it going. Maxim is driven back there despite all logic, purely because he can't really imagine being anywhere else. The protagagonist measures her level of success as a wife against her level of  control of Manderley: Mrs Danvers does almost the same thing: she uses her level of control to measure how successfully she is upholding Rebecca's memory - because Rebecca, really, becomes and  is Manderley. The finale shows who wins.

The house above is Milton Hall in Cambridgeshire and the one below is Menabilly, du Maurier's own home in Cornwall which she rented from the Rashleigh family. They both helped inspire du Maurier's masterpiece; although Milton Hall in particular seems to have a special link with terrifying, horrible women: Margaret Thatcher dined there.

Literary Landscapes: Charlotte Smith's Beachy Head

October 7th is National Poetry Day and seeing as I'll be at the Frankfurt Book Fair then and probably not able to blog (I'm sorry to brag, I'm just v. excited about being in the exciting world of publishing) I thought I would devote this week's Literary Landscapes to Beachy Head. This is a shot of the construction of the light house, and I find it bloody terrifying.

Lots of poets have tackled Beachy Head. It's inspired some pretty emo doggrel over the years, but also one of my favourite landscape poems: the eponymously named blank verse classic by Romantic Charlotte Smith.

ON thy stupendous summit, rock sublime !
That o'er the channel rear'd, half way at sea
The mariner at early morning hails,
I would recline; while Fancy should go forth,
And represent the strange and awful hour
Of vast concussion; when the Omnipotent
Stretch'd forth his arm, and rent the solid hills,
Bidding the impetuous main flood rush between 

The rifted shores, and from the continent
Eternally divided this green isle.
Imperial lord of the high southern coast ! 

Jodi Picoult has a Hissy Fit

Just a quick one today - a link to a Guardian report on Jodi Picoult's twitter rant at the New York Times. I'd have some sympathy with Picoult's assertion that she's ignored because she's a woman if she had any semblance of a talent which was something more than an uncanny ability to pick exactly the right moment to pitch a book about the latest dramatic topic which the media and a million insular housewives are currently driving themselves into a frenzy over and add nothing more to it than some misplaced adjectives and formulaic characters.

Chick Lit is one of my pet hates, and there'll be a rant about it on here sooner or later.

Anyway, here's the article