Each time Dick returns to real time he is more confused throughout the experience he is unable to interact with the couple. She has been conducting a secret affair with the brother of Sir Henry's wife, Sir Otto Bodrugan, who is waylaid and killed by Oliver's men.Įach visit corresponds to a key moment in the story of Isolda and Roger. Dick finds himself following Roger, who lives at Kilmarth, acts as steward to Sir Henry Champernoune, and is a secret admirer of the beautiful Isolda, wife of Sir Oliver Carminowe. He becomes drawn into the lives of the people he sees there and is soon addicted to the experience. On taking it for the first time, he finds that it enables him to enter into the landscape around him as it existed during the early 14th century. Dick reluctantly agrees to act as a test subject for a drug that Magnus has secretly developed. Īfter giving up his job the narrator, Dick Young, is offered the use of Kilmarth by an old university friend, biophysicist Magnus Lane. The setting for the story is an ancient Cornish house called Kilmarth, which is based on the house the author had recently bought following the death of her husband. 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". 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 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".
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. The US edition was published by Doubleday. 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.
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