Deaths in Venice: Daphne du Maurier’s ‘Don’t Look Now’

Abstract

In spite of the enduring popularity of Hitchcock’s 1940 film, most people recognise Rebecca (1938) as a Daphne du Maurier novel. Fewer people know that du Maurier wrote the short story ‘Don’t Look Now’ on which Nicholas Roeg’s 1973 film — described in The Second Virgin Film Guide as one of his ‘finest and most accessible’ works — is based (Monaco, 1993: 220). The story, published in 1971, is economically plotted. It opens with a conversation between John and his wife, Laura, who have come on a short holiday to Venice; they are there in order to try to recover some sense of normality following the loss of their five-year-old daughter, Christine, who has died from meningitis. John and Laura meet Scottish twin sisters in their sixties, one a retired doctor, the other blind, who are also tourists in Venice. The blind sister is psychic and claims to have had a vision of the couple’s dead daughter, which she communicates to Laura. Laura believes her and gains comfort and happiness from it; John is annoyed and upset by the claim. A strange incident occurs: one evening, walking in the narrow streets of Venice, they hear a strangled cry; John then catches sight of what looks like a little girl, wearing a pixie-hood, who seems to be trying to escape from something or someone by jumping from boat to boat in the canal.