Ruth Rendell and Barbara Vine – Family Matters

Abstract

This article traces themes and preoccupations that work across Ruth Rendell’s work, writing both as Rendell and also as Barbara Vine. It investigates the ways in which the use of a pseudonym allows her to delve deeper into areas that she also explores as Rendell – the dysfunctional family and heredity, both in relation to physical disease and the fruitless search for origins, the latter discussed by her through the lens of Freudian psychoanalysis.