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The Doll
Fiction Reprint, Short Story
Lost for more than 70 years, this dark story of a man's obsessive passion for Rebecca, a mysterious violinist, hasn't been published since it appeared in a small collection in 1937.
In 'The Doll', a waterlogged notebook is washed ashore. Its pages tell a dark story of obsession and jealousy. But the fate of its narrator is a mystery.
Lost for more than 70 years, this dark story of a man's obsessive passion for Rebecca, a mysterious violinist, hasn't been published since it appeared in a small collection in 1937.
In 'The Doll', a waterlogged notebook is washed ashore. Its pages tell a dark story of obsession and jealousy. But the fate of its narrator is a mystery.
ebook
Published April 30, 2011
2 people are currently reading
59 people want to read
About the author
Daphne du Maurier
426 books10.3k followersDaphne du Maurier was born on 13 May 1907 at 24 Cumberland Terrace, Regent's Park, London, the middle of three daughters of prominent actor-manager Sir Gerald du Maurier and actress Muriel, née Beaumont. In many ways her life resembles a fairy tale. Born into a family with a rich artistic and historical background, her paternal grandfather was author and Punch cartoonist George du Maurier, who created the character of Svengali in the 1894 novel Trilby, and her mother was a maternal niece of journalist, author, and lecturer Comyns Beaumont. She and her sisters were indulged as a children and grew up enjoying enormous freedom from financial and parental restraint. Her elder sister, Angela du Maurier, also became a writer, and her younger sister Jeanne was a painter.
She spent her youth sailing boats, travelling on the Continent with friends, and writing stories. Her family connections helped her establish her literary career, and she published some of her early work in Beaumont's Bystander magazine. A prestigious publishing house accepted her first novel when she was in her early twenties, and its publication brought her not only fame but the attentions of a handsome soldier, Major (later Lieutenant-General Sir) Frederick Browning, whom she married.
She continued writing under her maiden name, and her subsequent novels became bestsellers, earning her enormous wealth and fame. Many have been successfully adapted into films, including the novels Rebecca, Frenchman's Creek, My Cousin Rachel, and Jamaica Inn, and the short stories The Birds and Don't Look Now/Not After Midnight. While Alfred Hitchcock's films based upon her novels proceeded to make her one of the best-known authors in the world, she enjoyed the life of a fairy princess in a mansion in Cornwall called Menabilly, which served as the model for Manderley in Rebecca.
Daphne du Maurier was obsessed with the past. She intensively researched the lives of Francis and Anthony Bacon, the history of Cornwall, the Regency period, and nineteenth-century France and England. Above all, however, she was obsessed with her own family history, which she chronicled in Gerald: A Portrait, a biography of her father; The du Mauriers, a study of her family which focused on her grandfather, George du Maurier, the novelist and illustrator for Punch; The Glassblowers, a novel based upon the lives of her du Maurier ancestors; and Growing Pains, an autobiography that ignores nearly 50 years of her life in favour of the joyful and more romantic period of her youth. Daphne du Maurier can best be understood in terms of her remarkable and paradoxical family, the ghosts which haunted her life and fiction.
While contemporary writers were dealing critically with such subjects as the war, alienation, religion, poverty, Marxism, psychology and art, and experimenting with new techniques such as the stream of consciousness, du Maurier produced 'old-fashioned' novels with straightforward narratives that appealed to a popular audience's love of fantasy, adventure, sexuality and mystery. At an early age, she recognised that her readership was comprised principally of women, and she cultivated their loyal following through several decades by embodying their desires and dreams in her novels and short stories.
In some of her novels, however, she went beyond the technique of the formulaic romance to achieve a powerful psychological realism reflecting her intense feelings about her father, and to a lesser degree, her mother. This vision, which underlies Julius, Rebecca and The Parasites, is that of an author overwhelmed by the memory of her father's commanding presence. In Julius and The Parasites, for example, she introduces the image of a domineering but deadly father and the daring subject of incest.
In Rebecca, on the other hand, du Maurier fuses psychological realism with a sophisticated version of the Cinderella story.
She spent her youth sailing boats, travelling on the Continent with friends, and writing stories. Her family connections helped her establish her literary career, and she published some of her early work in Beaumont's Bystander magazine. A prestigious publishing house accepted her first novel when she was in her early twenties, and its publication brought her not only fame but the attentions of a handsome soldier, Major (later Lieutenant-General Sir) Frederick Browning, whom she married.
She continued writing under her maiden name, and her subsequent novels became bestsellers, earning her enormous wealth and fame. Many have been successfully adapted into films, including the novels Rebecca, Frenchman's Creek, My Cousin Rachel, and Jamaica Inn, and the short stories The Birds and Don't Look Now/Not After Midnight. While Alfred Hitchcock's films based upon her novels proceeded to make her one of the best-known authors in the world, she enjoyed the life of a fairy princess in a mansion in Cornwall called Menabilly, which served as the model for Manderley in Rebecca.
Daphne du Maurier was obsessed with the past. She intensively researched the lives of Francis and Anthony Bacon, the history of Cornwall, the Regency period, and nineteenth-century France and England. Above all, however, she was obsessed with her own family history, which she chronicled in Gerald: A Portrait, a biography of her father; The du Mauriers, a study of her family which focused on her grandfather, George du Maurier, the novelist and illustrator for Punch; The Glassblowers, a novel based upon the lives of her du Maurier ancestors; and Growing Pains, an autobiography that ignores nearly 50 years of her life in favour of the joyful and more romantic period of her youth. Daphne du Maurier can best be understood in terms of her remarkable and paradoxical family, the ghosts which haunted her life and fiction.
While contemporary writers were dealing critically with such subjects as the war, alienation, religion, poverty, Marxism, psychology and art, and experimenting with new techniques such as the stream of consciousness, du Maurier produced 'old-fashioned' novels with straightforward narratives that appealed to a popular audience's love of fantasy, adventure, sexuality and mystery. At an early age, she recognised that her readership was comprised principally of women, and she cultivated their loyal following through several decades by embodying their desires and dreams in her novels and short stories.
In some of her novels, however, she went beyond the technique of the formulaic romance to achieve a powerful psychological realism reflecting her intense feelings about her father, and to a lesser degree, her mother. This vision, which underlies Julius, Rebecca and The Parasites, is that of an author overwhelmed by the memory of her father's commanding presence. In Julius and The Parasites, for example, she introduces the image of a domineering but deadly father and the daring subject of incest.
In Rebecca, on the other hand, du Maurier fuses psychological realism with a sophisticated version of the Cinderella story.
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Displaying 1 - 18 of 18 reviews
September 17, 2018
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"You would be fatal to any man. A spark that lights, and does not burn itself, a flame fanning other flames."
Dark, gothic, and chilling, Du Maurier explores themes of obsession, jealousy, sex and passion in this tale about a woman's obsession with a mechanical male sex doll. Unsurprisingly one of the strangest things I've ever read and more unsurprising still, The Doll is beautifully written and an excellent example of Du Maurier's talent.
September 24, 2022
Well, this was definitely ahead of its time considering the whole sex doll aspect of the story. Wasn't expecting that!
May 3, 2024
Very interesting and, IMO, unusual for Daphne du Maurier. Could almost be classified in the sci-fi category!
December 3, 2025
THE DOLL IS A MALE SEX DOLL???? LMFAO I'm obsessed
April 1, 2023
Another short story by Du Maurier. How to describe this story, odd, disturbing, creepy, a love story perhaps?
This is a genre rarely used but quite popular. A person finds a pile of letters hidden away from the world, written by someone, perhaps true, but know one knows who the person is. It recounts details of a love story that never really happens. The decent into madness. It could also fit into a horror genre, but, either way never really took off. It could have been made more than it was.
Great premise, perhaps too short to be a good story.
This is a genre rarely used but quite popular. A person finds a pile of letters hidden away from the world, written by someone, perhaps true, but know one knows who the person is. It recounts details of a love story that never really happens. The decent into madness. It could also fit into a horror genre, but, either way never really took off. It could have been made more than it was.
Great premise, perhaps too short to be a good story.
November 5, 2021
ahead of its time
February 22, 2023
A really interesting and darkly humorous exploration of patriarchal possessiveness and stalking.
September 3, 2025
#Binge Reviewing my previous Reads #Horror Short Stories #Anthologies #International Horror (Europe, Asia, Latin America, Africa)
Daphne du Maurier’s The Doll is one of those early works that already contains the DNA of her later mastery—obsession, atmosphere, and the uncanny interplay of desire and dread. When I read it in 2017, I was struck by how modern it felt despite its 1928 origins. Here was a story that could easily sit beside contemporary horror in an anthology, its psychology sharp, its creepiness subtle yet profound. Du Maurier, even in her youth, had that instinct for peeling back the respectable veneer of human emotion and showing what festers beneath.
The story’s brilliance lies in how it makes the grotesque deeply intimate. A man’s obsession with a woman unravels when he discovers her attachment not to another man but to a doll—an artificial companion that exerts a gravitational pull stronger than flesh-and-blood relationships. It sounds almost absurd in summary, but du Maurier handles it with icy precision. What might be written today as satire or even camp is, in her hands, a story of loneliness, obsession, and the limits of human connection. The doll itself becomes more than an object—it becomes a rival, a secret, and ultimately a threat.
When placed against Crawford’s The Dead Smile, the difference in approach is clear. Crawford builds gothic grandeur, steeping his horror in family estates, ancestral curses, and decadent imagery. Du Maurier, in contrast, brings horror inward, into the private chambers of intimacy, into the spaces where passion curdles into fixation.
The scale is smaller, but the effect is no less chilling. In some ways, it anticipates Rampo’s The Human Chair, where a hidden obsession turns the ordinary into a vessel of horror. Both stories remind us that monstrosity often hides in desire itself.
What fascinated me was how The Doll also resonates with Quiroga’s The Feather Pillow. In both, the bedchamber becomes a site of uncanny intrusion—the intimate space is no longer safe. Quiroga uses parasitism to erode trust; du Maurier uses artificiality. The doll, lifeless yet commanding, is not merely a prop but a rival presence that corrodes intimacy. If Quiroga’s pillow harbors unseen horror, du Maurier’s doll is horror made explicit, yet equally inexplicable.
Compared to Elizabeth Bowen’s The Demon Lover, which hinges on the reappearance of a ghostly suitor, du Maurier’s tale is less spectral and more psychological. Yet both stories share an interest in how women navigate unwanted claims on their desire. Bowen casts the ghost as an inescapable return; du Maurier casts the doll as chosen but equally uncanny. Together, they show how horror often interrogates women’s autonomy, framing love itself as something perilous, even monstrous.
Stylistically, du Maurier is as controlled here as in her later Rebecca or Don’t Look Now. Her sentences are spare, not lush; her tone is clinical, almost detached. That restraint makes the story even more disquieting, as though the narrator is reporting events without realizing their full horror. In this sense, she reminds me of Maupassant—particularly The Hand—where understatement allows the imagination to expand the terror beyond the page. Both writers knew that horror need not shout; sometimes it’s enough to place an inexplicable presence in the room and step back.
What keeps The Doll relevant is its ability to mirror contemporary anxieties. In an age of virtual intimacy, artificial intelligence, and blurred boundaries between human and machine, the story feels prophetic. Reading it in 2017, I couldn’t help but think of how technology mediates desire and how companionship itself is being redefined. Du Maurier, nearly a century ago, had already imagined what it meant for human relationships to be destabilized by the artificial.
The story lingers because it refuses resolution. We are left not with a scream or a revelation but with unease—the sense that desire, by its very nature, courts destruction. That’s du Maurier’s gift: she doesn’t show us ghosts or curses but the unsettling possibility that what we love may not love us back, that intimacy itself can turn alien.
Placed in the arc of horror short stories, The Doll is a reminder that the most terrifying things aren’t always supernatural. Sometimes, horror is just the mirror we hold up to our own obsessions, and the realization that the reflection staring back is stranger than we imagined.
Daphne du Maurier’s The Doll is one of those early works that already contains the DNA of her later mastery—obsession, atmosphere, and the uncanny interplay of desire and dread. When I read it in 2017, I was struck by how modern it felt despite its 1928 origins. Here was a story that could easily sit beside contemporary horror in an anthology, its psychology sharp, its creepiness subtle yet profound. Du Maurier, even in her youth, had that instinct for peeling back the respectable veneer of human emotion and showing what festers beneath.
The story’s brilliance lies in how it makes the grotesque deeply intimate. A man’s obsession with a woman unravels when he discovers her attachment not to another man but to a doll—an artificial companion that exerts a gravitational pull stronger than flesh-and-blood relationships. It sounds almost absurd in summary, but du Maurier handles it with icy precision. What might be written today as satire or even camp is, in her hands, a story of loneliness, obsession, and the limits of human connection. The doll itself becomes more than an object—it becomes a rival, a secret, and ultimately a threat.
When placed against Crawford’s The Dead Smile, the difference in approach is clear. Crawford builds gothic grandeur, steeping his horror in family estates, ancestral curses, and decadent imagery. Du Maurier, in contrast, brings horror inward, into the private chambers of intimacy, into the spaces where passion curdles into fixation.
The scale is smaller, but the effect is no less chilling. In some ways, it anticipates Rampo’s The Human Chair, where a hidden obsession turns the ordinary into a vessel of horror. Both stories remind us that monstrosity often hides in desire itself.
What fascinated me was how The Doll also resonates with Quiroga’s The Feather Pillow. In both, the bedchamber becomes a site of uncanny intrusion—the intimate space is no longer safe. Quiroga uses parasitism to erode trust; du Maurier uses artificiality. The doll, lifeless yet commanding, is not merely a prop but a rival presence that corrodes intimacy. If Quiroga’s pillow harbors unseen horror, du Maurier’s doll is horror made explicit, yet equally inexplicable.
Compared to Elizabeth Bowen’s The Demon Lover, which hinges on the reappearance of a ghostly suitor, du Maurier’s tale is less spectral and more psychological. Yet both stories share an interest in how women navigate unwanted claims on their desire. Bowen casts the ghost as an inescapable return; du Maurier casts the doll as chosen but equally uncanny. Together, they show how horror often interrogates women’s autonomy, framing love itself as something perilous, even monstrous.
Stylistically, du Maurier is as controlled here as in her later Rebecca or Don’t Look Now. Her sentences are spare, not lush; her tone is clinical, almost detached. That restraint makes the story even more disquieting, as though the narrator is reporting events without realizing their full horror. In this sense, she reminds me of Maupassant—particularly The Hand—where understatement allows the imagination to expand the terror beyond the page. Both writers knew that horror need not shout; sometimes it’s enough to place an inexplicable presence in the room and step back.
What keeps The Doll relevant is its ability to mirror contemporary anxieties. In an age of virtual intimacy, artificial intelligence, and blurred boundaries between human and machine, the story feels prophetic. Reading it in 2017, I couldn’t help but think of how technology mediates desire and how companionship itself is being redefined. Du Maurier, nearly a century ago, had already imagined what it meant for human relationships to be destabilized by the artificial.
The story lingers because it refuses resolution. We are left not with a scream or a revelation but with unease—the sense that desire, by its very nature, courts destruction. That’s du Maurier’s gift: she doesn’t show us ghosts or curses but the unsettling possibility that what we love may not love us back, that intimacy itself can turn alien.
Placed in the arc of horror short stories, The Doll is a reminder that the most terrifying things aren’t always supernatural. Sometimes, horror is just the mirror we hold up to our own obsessions, and the realization that the reflection staring back is stranger than we imagined.
October 4, 2025
A well-read audiobook is here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YP7sY...
Maybe the doll is a sex doll or the woman has an object fetish, or maybe the woman was herself a former doll brought to life, as the way the protagonist describes her seems like a person describing a large doll.
Or maybe that's not what Du Maurier's real interest is. There's a noticeable parallel between the woman's love of a doll, and the protagonist's way of seeing and treating the woman rather like a doll: he sees her as a love object, describes her in an infantilizing and almost nonhuman way, and has no interest in her real personality or desires, just in possessing her. He laments that she'll never know real love, but maybe he never will either, because he sees her as about as much of a person as she sees her doll.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YP7sY...
Maybe the doll is a sex doll or the woman has an object fetish, or maybe the woman was herself a former doll brought to life, as the way the protagonist describes her seems like a person describing a large doll.
Or maybe that's not what Du Maurier's real interest is. There's a noticeable parallel between the woman's love of a doll, and the protagonist's way of seeing and treating the woman rather like a doll: he sees her as a love object, describes her in an infantilizing and almost nonhuman way, and has no interest in her real personality or desires, just in possessing her. He laments that she'll never know real love, but maybe he never will either, because he sees her as about as much of a person as she sees her doll.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
October 18, 2025
Listened to this on the Classic Ghost Stories podcast via YouTube (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YP7sY...). Great narration! Story is about half an hour, and the last 10-15 minutes is commentary on the story and du Maurier that's funny and interesting.
December 16, 2025
Incredibly haunting story, beautifully written.
December 20, 2025
Recently re-read this one. I could still see Rebecca existing today lol. This story definitely deserves some sort of horror adaptation.
January 4, 2026
One of those stories where nothing happens. . . .
October 23, 2023
This story is very riveting and leaves you wondering a bit but is very well written and keeps you wanting to read more even when you finish it. It centers around a man who doesn't seem to be given a name in the story unless I missed it. He becomes infatuated with a woman he happens to see who plays the violin. He visits her, and they seem to become infatuated, however, she keeps putting him off. She then introduces him to her "friend" Julio who is in another room in her house. Upon seeing Julio, the man becomes shocked to see that Julio is nothing but a mechanical doll. A great read, one to ponder, and I do recommend this one. It's very different.
October 11, 2023
Ok, I have to ask.
Is this a sex thing? 'Cause this feels like a sex thing.
A weird ass short story about a weird ass girl, and a gross dude with serious incel vibes, before incels were a thing. Not my favorite story of du Maurier's, especially given that the main woman of this story is ALSO named Rebecca, which gave me seriously weird vibes given that I'm also reading the BOOK Rebecca, by the same author. I keep thinking of Rebecca DeWinter, and it makes me giggle.
Not bad, though, but it's one of those "everyone's weird here" kinda things.
Is this a sex thing? 'Cause this feels like a sex thing.
A weird ass short story about a weird ass girl, and a gross dude with serious incel vibes, before incels were a thing. Not my favorite story of du Maurier's, especially given that the main woman of this story is ALSO named Rebecca, which gave me seriously weird vibes given that I'm also reading the BOOK Rebecca, by the same author. I keep thinking of Rebecca DeWinter, and it makes me giggle.
Not bad, though, but it's one of those "everyone's weird here" kinda things.
November 3, 2024
I wasn't sure I fully grasped this story, especially what significance the ending played, but after reading a bit of analysis, I think I can see it. I love du Maurier and the emphasis on a character here called "Rebecca" made it extra fun.
April 3, 2021
The Doll. A sex doll. A very creepy sex doll.
Du Maurier was definitely ahead of her time.
Du Maurier was definitely ahead of her time.
Displaying 1 - 18 of 18 reviews