Rose Tremain has frequently looked at history through the eyes of its servants. A retired butler was the subject of her debut novel, Sadler’s Birthday (1976), while her best-known historical novels, Restoration (1989) and Music and Silence (1999), follow courtiers navigating the whims of fickle monarchs. For the last twelve years, she has been toying with one of the most memorable servants in English fiction: Mrs Danvers, the ghoulish housekeeper at the heart of Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca, who unnerves a widower’s naive second wife with references to her charismatic predecessor.

Drawing on du Maurier’s affairs with women, and the strange pull between Mrs Danvers and both wives, Tremain has imagined Lilianne Danowski, a housekeeper of Jewish-Polish origin who conducts a passionate and secret affair with Daphne only to experience a terrible sense of betrayal when she is recast as Mrs Danvers. It’s a great premise, one she first imagined in ‘The Housekeeper’, a short story collected in The American Lover (2014) and then expanded into the screenplay for a forthcoming film directed by Richard Eyre. It’s an unusual genesis for a novel, and The Housekeeper makes for an unusual reading experience.

The first act is primarily an amusing exercise for fans of du Maurier’s novel. We encounter similar names and scenarios, and the first line, ‘Last night I dreamed I saw Daphne again’, is an allusion to the opening sentence of Rebecca. Danni, as the guarded protagonist is known, proves to