Two of my goals aligned this year: first, to read something by Daphne du Maurier; second, to read a time travel book for my local library’s 2024 challenge. Now, I had no idea these two goals would align since I didn’t know du Maurier wrote a time travel novel. I certainly had never suspected The House on the Strand to be a time travel novel.

Taking its cue, I suspect, from the more popular experimentation with psychedelic drugs in the 1960s, a professor puts together a concoction that allows the user to mentally, though not physically, go back in time. There is so far no way to determine a destination. This professor has invited his old friend — our narrator, Dick Young — to use his home, Kilmarth, for a season, and he very much hopes that he’ll act as a test subject for the new drug. When the novel begins, Dick is alone at Kilmarth — his wife and two step-sons aren’t expected until the following week — and so he tries the mixture. Lo and behold he is transported mentally back to the early 14th century where he can spy on the messy relationships among the nobility that inhabited the environs of Kilmarth long before Kilmarth was even dreamed of.

The book becomes intriguing to me — and also distasteful — when Dick’s wife, Vita, arrives a few days early, and Dick is forced to contend with the messy relationships in his own present. Dick is, to my eyes, a repugnant misogynist, a quintessential gaslighter as he tries to pursue his desire to go to the past, particularly to see Isolda, a woman who is long dead and whom he cannot interact with, while avoiding his wife’s increasingly confused and then disturbed understanding of what her husband is up to. Their conversations, how he infantilizes and belittles her only to cover up his own deception, are tough to read.

Was that what this book is about? A man who sees the women in his life only through the lens of his own desire? That’s certainly what I took away, though I’m not so sure that’s what du Maurier was going about to accomplish. Clearly the drug was a selfish — and dangerous, Dick physically wanders the current physical world while mentally wandering around in the old world — escape. But something in the telling of the story, while showing Dick as selfish and manipulative, made me wonder if I wasn’t supposed to sympathize with him. I don’t know nearly enough about du Maurier or the criticism surrounding this strange but intriguing novel to get a good sense.

I like that this novel disturbed and intrigued me, though. I am curious to hear from anyone else who has read it. What did you think? What did you take away?