Philip learns that Ambrose and Rachel have married via a letter from his cousin. It is winter when Ambrose visits Italy where he and Rachel meet. He begins the story of Rachel by telling the reader that after the deaths of his parents,his cousin Ambrose raised him, and that he was raised without women in his life, as Ambrose did not trust them. The events of the novel have already transpired and Philip is musing over Rachel’s fate and trying to deal with his own guilt. Philip is drawn to Rachel, yet he is haunted by suspicions about her and thinks she needs to be saved from herself. While Philip has an aura of innocence, Rachel has a worldly persona and might have murdered her husband. Central to My Cousin Rachel is the relationship of the young Englishman Philip and Rachel, the widow of Philip’s cousin. The novel continues to be celebrated in Cornwall where there is a five mile stretch in the Barton area called the My Cousin Rachel Walk. Rachel Carew married Ambrose Manaton of Kilworthy in 1690. The author was inspired by a seventeenth century portrait of Rachel Carew she saw at Anthony House in Cornwall. My Cousin Rachel is set in the nineteenth century and,not for the first time in the du Maurier canon, has Menabilly as its main location. The building up of suspense and the gothic atmosphere are comparable to Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre. In the spirit of her classic Rebecca, it is a romantic mystery that takes place largely on an estate in Cornwall. British author Daphne du Maurier published her tenth novel, My Cousin Rachel, in 1951.
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