Rebecca (novel) glamorous, dark-haired Jan Ricardo. The suspicion that Tommy remained attracted to Ricardo haunted Daphne." In "The Rebecca Notebook" of 1981, du Maurier "'remembered' Rebecca's gestation … Seeds began to drop. A beautiful home... a first wife... jealousy, a wreck, perhaps at sea, near to the house... But something terrible would have to happen, I did not know what..." She wrote in her notes prior to writing: 'I want to build up the character of the first [wife] in the mind of the second... until wife 2 is haunted day and night... a tragedy is looming very close and CRASH! BANG!
Rule Britannia (novel) the Darlings. But du Maurier also put more of her own character into Mad than she realised. Westland suggested that du Maurier's motive in writing the book was to explore her own feelings about the Britain that her grandchildren would inherit. She hated the superior attitude of London, and the crass interventions from up-country. In the novel she tried to give Cornwall back to the Cornish and let them defend their own land. Rule Britannia (novel) Rule Britannia is Daphne du Maurier's last novel, published in 1972 by Victor Gollancz. The novel is set in a fictional near future in