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Such also is the evidence of the life Jacqueline du Pré, whose illness and death are a virtual textbook illustration of the devastating effects of the stress brought on by emotional repression.
    People often wept at du Pre’s concerts. Her communication with audiences, someone remarked, “was quite breathtaking and left everyone spellbound.” Her playing was passionate, sometimes unbearably intense. She blazed a direct path to the emotions. Unlike her private persona, her stage presence was completely uninhibited: hair flying, body swaying, it was more typical of rock ‘n’ roll flamboyance than of classical restraint. “She appeared to be a sweet, demure milkmaid,” an observer recalled, “but with cello in hands she was like one possessed.” 10
    To this day some of du Pré’s recorded performances, notably of the Elgar cello concerto, are unsurpassed—and are likely to remain so. This concerto was the eminent composer’s last major work, created in a mood of despondency in the wake of the First World War. “Everything good and nice and clean and fresh and sweet is far away, never to return,” Edward Elgar wrote in 1917. He was in his seventh decade, in the twilight of his years. “Jackie’s ability to portray the emotions of a man in the autumn of his life was one of her extraordinary and inexplicable capacities,” writes her sister, Hilary du Pré, in her book,
A Genius in the Family. 11
    Extraordinary, yes. Inexplicable? Perhaps not. Although she was unaware of it, by the time she was twenty, Jacqueline du Pré was also in the autumn of her life. The illness that was soon to end her musicalcareer was only a few years away. Regret, loss and resignation had all been too abundantly a part of her unspoken emotional experience. She understood Elgar because she had partaken of the same suffering. His portrait always disturbed her. “He had a miserable life, Hil,” she told her sibling, “and he was ill, yet through it all he had a radiant soul, and that’s what I feel in his music.”
    She was describing herself, from her earliest beginnings. Jackie’s mother, Iris, suffered the death of her own father while she was still in the maternity hospital with Jackie. From then on, Jackie’s relationship with her mother became one of symbiotic dependence from which neither party could free herself. The child was neither allowed to be a child nor permitted to grow up to be an adult.
    Jackie was a sensitive child, quiet and shy, sometimes mischievous. She was said to have been placid, except when playing the cello. A music teacher recalls her at age six as having been “terribly polite and nicely brought up.” She presented a pleasant and compliant face to the world. The secretary at the girls’ school Jackie attended remembers her as a happy and cheerful child. A high-school classmate recalls her as a “friendly, jolly girl who fitted in well.”
    Jackie’s inner reality was quite different. Hilary recounts that her sister burst into tears one day: “No one likes me at school. It’s horrible. They all tease me.” In an interview Jacqueline portrayed herself as “one of those children other children can’t stand. They used to form gangs and chant horrid things.” She was an awkward youngster, socially gauche, with no academic interests and little to say. According to her sister, Jackie always had difficulty expressing herself in words. “Observant friends noted an incipient strain of melancholy underneath Jackie’s sunny exterior,” writes her biographer, Elizabeth Wilson, in
Jacqueline du Pré. 12
    All her life, until her illness, Jackie would hide her feelings from her mother. Hilary recalls a chilling childhood memory of Jacqueline’s intense expression and secretive whisper, “Hil, don’t tell Mum but … when I grow up, I won’t be able to walk or move.” How are we to understand that horrific self-prophecy? Either as something uncanny or as the projection of exactly how, in her unconscious