Art & Creativity Quote by Daphne du Maurier

Du Maurier slips on the voice of a chatty confidante here, then uses it to smuggle in something nastier: a refusal to tidy up the mess. The question about the dropped telephone is the kind of detail readers latch onto when a novel ends with a psychic bruise. She answers it with a shrug - "I don't really know" - but it is a stage-managed shrug, the author performing uncertainty to keep the ending alive, twitching, in the reader's mind.

The telephone matters because it is modernity's lifeline: connection, rescue, the easy exit from danger. Dropping it is a tiny physical action that reads like moral and neurological collapse. In The House on the Strand, Dick's time-slip obsession isn't just a plot device; it's a dependency, an engineered retreat into a more intoxicating past. So the "paralysed for life" line lands as both literal prognosis and metaphor: not merely a body failing, but a will that has forfeited agency. Du Maurier is unusually blunt about the cost of escapism, and she makes that cost bodily, irreversible, unromantic.

Then comes the real needle: "Don't you?" It's faux-democratic, inviting your interpretation, but also nudging you toward her bleakest one. The subtext is authorial complicity turned into a social contract: if you agree, you're not just reading the tragedy - you're helping seal it. Du Maurier understood that the most effective horror isn't a monster; it's the moment the hand reaches for help and simply can't hold on.