chatelaine

Daisy found it impossible to keep her eyes off her ‘pitty aunty’, but attached herself like a lap dog to the wonderful chatelaine full of delightful charms.

Her assigned role as the “chatelaine of a neocolonial pleasure palace” discomforts her, because it smacks of presiding over a plantation in the antebellum South.

When they marry, Max takes the second Mrs. de Winter to Manderley, his family estate on the stormy English coast, where his first wife, Rebecca, held court as a legendary beauty, hostess and chatelaine.

The chatelaine uprooted some ferns, which she “arranged so as to conceal me,” then left her guest to sleep on the ground.

When Sonya, the underappreciated chatelaine of the estate, pronounces herself “unattractive,” “not pretty” and also “plain,” she is making fine distinctions but also loathing herself harder as all three.