The Scapegoat (Virago Modern Classics)

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And instead of writing herself into the story, the author took on the guise of a male narrator, one of five occasions in major novels when she did this. But it also owes a great deal to "Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde" as Daphne du Maurier also explores how two selves begin to feel as if they are part of the same person, the viewpoint character.

They were real, fallible human beings, and as John and I learned more about their past – and about Jean – I understood how their characters and attitude had been formed. Adrian Harrington began trading in 1971, as part of Harrington Brothers in the Chelsea Antiques Market on London's fashionable King's Road. While on holidays in France, he finds himself in the place of a doppelgänger and feels strangely compelled to hold up to that almost untenable situation. Seven days is all John got but what was accomplished in those seven days was remarkable changes for the whole family of Comte de Gué of St.Don’t think, I’ve ever heard of this one before, but I’ve enjoyed Rebecca and in particular My Cousin Rachel and just read The Birds for the first time. Or that Tana French where the police detective moves into a house where they know the missing woman extremely well, which did not seem a big plausible, although fascinating to read. Jean wants to play a clever game – that of switching identities with John and assuming each other’s lives.

The book is in good condition for its age, may include an inscription on the first page or a small ink stain on the side; a delightful addition to any library! Originally, in the Old Testament book of Leviticus, the High Priest confessed the sins of the people on the Day of Atonement over the head of a live goat which was then allowed to escape, taking the sins with it. I’d never read a book by Daphne du Maurier before so I wasn’t sure quite which I'd get - the overblown or the stilted - but I was confident the plot would be asinine. In Rebecca, on the other hand, du Maurier fuses psychological realism with a sophisticated version of the Cinderella story. There is a bit of an anticlimax at the end, and du Maurier did not quite manage to suspend our disbelief completely regarding this situation of two compete look alikes, who speak different languages, not only meeting but then one’s family mistaking a stranger for its own family member, inviting him home.If everything in the book is supposed to be taken literally, then we need to suspend belief at times: could two men really be so identical that even their mother, wife and daughter can't tell the difference? In Julius and The Parasites, for example, she introduces the image of a domineering but deadly father and the daring subject of incest. Everyone is an actor in the Jean’s household, everyone except maybe the daughter of Jean – Marie-Noel.