The House On The Strand

About this book

The House on the Strand is a novel by Daphne du Maurier, first published in the UK in 1969 by Victor Gollancz, with a jacket illustration by her daughter, Flavia Tower. The US edition was published by Doubleday. Like many of du Maurier's novels, The House on the Strand has a supernatural element, exploring the ability to mentally travel back in time and experience historical events at first hand - but not to influence them. It has been called a Gothic tale, "influenced by writers as diverse as Robert Louis Stevenson, Dante, and the psychologist Carl Jung, in which a sinister potion enables the central character to escape the constraints of his dreary married life by travelling back through time". The narrator agrees to test a drug that transports him back to 14th century Cornwall and becomes absorbed in the lives of people he meets there, to the extent that the two worlds he is living in start to merge. It is set in and around Kilmarth, where Daphne du Maurier lived from 1967, near the village of Tywardreath, which in Cornish means "House on the Strand".