The Short Fiction of Daphne Du Maurier
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About this book
This collection gathers the short fiction of Daphne du Maurier, the English writer celebrated for suspense and unease hidden beneath ordinary surfaces. Her early stories already carry the instinct that would make her novels famous: quiet lives tilting toward menace, secrets kept and then exposed, and people undone by their own longings. Written as she was finding her voice, they move through soured romance, sharp social observation, and the small cruelties that pass between husbands, wives, and strangers. Even here she is alert to atmosphere and to the distance between what a character shows and what they conceal, which gives the pieces a tension out of proportion to their length.
From the opening pages
Bridget woke up with a start.
Somewhere something had fallen; perhaps a slate from the roof, or maybe it was only a door banging on the floor above. She did not know this, of course; at six years old it is difficult to reason about strange noises, or about anything that happens in the middle of the night. Half-past nine was the same as midnight to Bridget.
For a few minutes she lay awake wondering what it was that had woken her. She no longer felt tired or sleepy, her mind was alert, and every nerve was on edge. Then she opened her eyes and looked around her. At first everything seemed black, pitch black, but as she became accustomed to the darkness the furniture in the bedroom gradually began to take shape.
A queer, ghastly shape.
This was not the same room as the one in which she had undressed. She saw that Nanny had not come up yet, because the bed was empty.
But, what is empty? The pillow must have slipped a little, for something bulky lay in the corner by the turned-down sheet. A piece of blanket had become untucked at the side; it was rolled slightly, and stretched across the centre of the bed. Yet it was not like an ordinary piece of blanket, this rolled object, it was an arm—a cold, white arm—with no body near it, with no person to whom it belonged.
A loose arm hanging from nowhere …
Bridget shrank back in her bed and turned her eyes away, but this time they fell on the wardrobe at the end of the room. It looked huge and sinister, far taller than in the daytime; it seemed to stretch as high as the ceiling.
And there was a dark, inky black corner just by the side of it.
Contents
About the author
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Book facts
- Author
- Daphne du Maurier
- Reading time
- About 90 minutes
- Pages
- 61
- Language
- English
- Genre
- British Classics
- Formats
- PDF, EPUB, Read online