Starting tomorrow, we will be featuring the books of the great DAPHNE DU MAURIER, who is actually Dame Daphne Du Maurier, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.
You can read a lot about her here:http://www.dumaurier.org/
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http://www.cornwall-calling.co.uk/famous-cornish-p
Daphne du Maurier was born in London in 1907, the second daughter of Muriel and Gerald du Maurier, one of the most famous Actor Managers of his day. Daphne Du Maurier attended schools in London, Meudon, France, and Paris. In her childhood she read many books, and was fascinated by imaginary worlds.
Her parents purchased a holiday home at Bodinnick near Fowey, and so began her love of Cornwall. She started to write short stories in 1928. In the end she wrote 38 books, and it is her Cornish-based books that remain the most popular and well known.
Whilst staying at that house (called Ferryside today) she wrote her first novel The Loving Spirit (published in 1931). A story set in the fictitious town of Plyn, it concerns the lives of Cornish boat builders. It was apparently this book that brought Daphne and her future husband together. Major Tommy ('Boy') Browning was so moved by the book that he sailed to Fowey to meet the author. They fell in love and in July 1932 were married at Lanteglos Church.
On a cold day in 1930 Daphne du Maurier stayed at Jamaica Inn on Bodmin Moor.
This gave her the inspitation for perhaps her most famous a novel which was dramatised in 1936 by Alfred Hitchcock and starred Maureen O’Hara and then remade in 1982 starring Jane Seymour.
During the first ten years of their marriage Daphne only spent holidays in Cornwall. Daphne du Maurier and her husband, by now Major-General Sir Frederick Browning moved to Cornwall in 1943 with their three children (one son and two daughters ).
She rented a house in Fowey called Readymoney. Years before this she had discovered Menabilly, a seventeenth-century mansion overlooking the sea, and belonging to the Rashleigh family. Once she lived in Cornwall she asked the family if she could rent the property. They agreed, she got a 25 year lease, and in 1943 she moved into the house which was to inspiration for Rebecca's opening line, "Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again," among the most memorable in twentieth-century and the novel is set in Menabilly.
Her most famous works include Rebecca, Frenchman's Creek, My Cousin Rachel and of course Jamaica Inn.
Some of her books were turned into very successful films.Jamaica Inn , Rebecca ( a literary classic and was the inspiration for Alfred Hitchcock's Oscar-winning film) are available on DVD.
Her husband, died in 1965, and when the lease on Menabilly expired in 1969 she moved to another house rented to her by the Rashleigh family, Kilmarth about a mile from Menabilly. She was named a Dame of the British Empire in 1969.
Kilmarth was owned by a medieval steward named Roger Kylman in 1327 and subsequently by the Rashleighs. It here that she lived out the rest of her life, a house that she immortalised in the novel The House on the Strand.
Daphne du Maurier's died in 1989. And according to her wishes, her body was cremated and her ashes were scattered on the cliffs near her home.
Daphne du Maurier possibly had lesbian tendencies (she called them "Venetian tendencies") emerged after her deth. She may have had intimate relationships with several women, including Gertrude Lawrence.
Daphne du Maurier, The Secret Life by Margaret Foster. She maintained a charming facade, while underneath there was emotional turbulence and ambiguity. Margaret Forster explores - with the co-operation of the family and access to revealing unpublished letters - Daphne's relationship with her father, her marriage to 'Boy' Browning, her secret wartime love affair, and her highly significant friendship with Gertrude Lawrence.
If Daphne du Maurier had written onlyRebecca, she would still be one of the great shapers of popular culture and the modern imagination. Few writers have created more magical and mysterious places than Jamaica Inn and Manderley, buildings invested with a rich character that gives them a memorable life of their own.
In many ways the life of Daphne du Maurier resembles that of a fairy tale. Born into a family with a rich artistic and historical background, the daughter of a famous actor-manager, she was indulged as a child and grew up enjoying enormous freedom from financial and parental restraint. She spent her youth sailing boats, travelling on the Continent with friends, and writing stories. 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, who married her.
Her subsequent novels became bestsellers, earning her enormous wealth and fame. While Alfred Hitchcock's film based upon her novel 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 or 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 or 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. The nameless heroine has been saved from a life of drudgery by marrying a handsome, wealthy aristocrat, but unlike the Prince in Cinderella, Maxim de Winter is old enough to be the narrator's father. The narrator thus must do battle with The Other Woman - the dead Rebecca and her witch-like surrogate, Mrs Danvers - to win the love of her husband and father-figure. The fantasy of this novel is fulfilled when Maxim confesses to the narrator that he never loved Rebecca; indeed, he hated her, a confession that allows the narrator to emerge triumphantly from the Oedipal triangle.
The Freudian subtext of Rebecca is embodied in a form that represents the first major Gothic romance of the twentieth century and perhaps the finest written to this day. It contains most of the trappings of the typical Gothic romance: a mysterious, haunted mansion, violence, murder, a sinister villain, sexual passion, a spectacular fire, a brooding landscape and a version of the mad woman in the attic. Du Maurier's work, however, is much more than a simple thriller or mystery. It is a profound and fascinating study of an obsessive personality, of sexual dominance, of human identity and of the liberation of the hidden self.
Rebecca and the two short stories, 'The Birds' and 'Don't Look Now', stand out among du Maurier's work as landmarks in the development of the modern Gothic tale. She breathes new life into the old form of the Gothic novel to come up with a classic tale of The Othcr Woman. Millions have identified with the plain, nameless narrator of Rebecca, a woman who defines her personality by overcoming the mother-figure of Rebecca to win the lasting love of her father-lover. 'The Birds' and 'Don't Look Now' established the twentieth-century sense of dislocation. The accepted order of things suddenly, and for no apparent reason, is upset. The great chain of being breaks and people find themselves battling for their lives against creatures they always assumed inferior to themselves: birds and children. The continuity of time itself is in question in 'Don't Look Now' as the future bleeds into the present.
Daphne du Maurier was not the sort of person to join the ranks of authors who appear regularly on television talk shows to promote their books. As her fame grew through her novels and the films based upon them. she became more reclusive. She viewed success as 'a very personal thing, like saying one's prayers or making love'. The greatest blow dealt to her came with the death of her husband. 'Boy' Browning, in 1965. In order to ease her pain she had at first taken over some of his things for herself. She wore his shirts, sat at his writing desk, used his pen to answer the hundreds of letters of condolence and by this process came to feel closer to him. The evenings were the hardest to endure: 'the ritual of the hot drink, the lumps of sugar for the two dogs, the saying of prayers - his boyhood habit carried on throughout our married life - the goodnight kiss.'
After his death, du Maurier moved from Menabilly to Kilmarth, a house once owned by a medieval steward named Roger Kylman in 1327 and subsequently by the Rashleighs. the descendants of whom are the current owners. It was in this historic house that du Maurier lived out the rest of her life, a house that she immortalised in the novel The House on the Strand.
In November 1988, I visited Daphne du Maurier in Kilmarth. She appeared quite small, sitting in a chair surrounded by piles of newspapers she had been reading. I had known her face from photographs taken in her youth, a beauty made haunting and foreboding by the deep shadows around the eyes. In her eighties, those eyes retained the same dark mystery of the recluse who had chosen to live amongst her memories and the ghosts that filled the room in photographs, paintings and memorabilia. In the dining room there was a large oil-painting of her as a young woman, many photographs of her father in jaunty poses, numerous medals that had been awarded to her husband during the war and a photograph of Dwight Eisenhower inscribed to him. 'Boy' Browning and Gerald du Maurier were the great heroes of her life and her fiction, the two ghosts of her past that embodied all the love. adventure and romance that through her writing she generously and skillfully shared with us all.
Reproduced by kind permission of Richard Kelly.
THE INDEPENDENT Friday 21 April 1989
All Copyright is acknowledged
http://www.dumaurier.org/obituary.html
From Wikipedia:
Dame Daphne du Maurier, Lady Browning DBE (13 May 1907 – 19 April 1989; pronounced /ˈdæfni duː ˈmɒrieɪ/) was an English author and playwright. Many of her works have been adapted into films, including the novels Rebecca, which won the Best Picture Oscar in 1941, Jamaica Inn, and her short storiesThe Birds and Don't Look Now. The first three were directed by Alfred Hitchcock. Her elder sister was Angela du Maurier, also a writer. Her father was the actor Gerald du Maurier, and her grandfather was the writer George du Maurier.
http://www.devonhumanists.org.uk/d200dev/?page_id=
This is not an article by a scientist about science. Neither the author of this piece nor the central character, the renowned writer Daphne du Maurier, have or had the scientific knowledge for that. Instead, it is an appreciation of Daphne du Maurier’s perception of Darwinianism and how it influenced her beliefs and the way she wrote. An examination of the latter, the influence of her beliefs on her novels, short stories, biographies and other work can be found in The Mysterious Humanism Of Daphne du Maurier (to which there is a link at the end of this article).
If a few of Daphne’s views in the quotations which follow are not entirely as scientists today might express them, this should reasonably be explained both by her layman’s knowledge of the subject and the time at which she wrote. She first published This I Believe, on which much of this article is based, over a quarter of a century ago.
A Unique Writer
Daphne was not, as is so often claimed, a writer of romantic fiction. She would exclaim in exasperation that she had only ever written one romantic novel, namely Frenchman’s Creek. Even her most widely known and filmed Rebecca she called ‘a study in jealousy’ and we might call it a psychological thriller today, especially if we think of the book rather than the films inspired by it. So what sort of writer was she?
Described by Professor Nina Auerbach as “a complex, powerful, unique writer, so unorthodox that no critical tradition, from formalism to feminism, can digest her” (Daphne du Maurier: Haunted Heiress), she was famous for her novels and short stories including Rebecca, Frenchman’s Creek, Jamaica Inn, The Birds, Don’t Look Now, Julius, The House On The Strand, and many more; in addition to well-regarded biographies of, for example, the Bacon brothers, Branwell Bronte, and her own distinguished family.
Big Questions
She also wrote about her deepest feelings and beliefs. In her essay This I Believe (to which the page references refer) - andelsewhere, such as letters to her friend Oriel Mallet - Daphne explained what she thought of the ‘big questions’ concerning god and religion, human development, the improbability of life after death, the supernatural, and the basis of morality. What I Believe reveals a worldview not dissimilar to modern secular Humanism. This can be identified in much of her writing, as shown in The Mysterious Humanism of Daphne du Maurier.
After having explained that she is not convinced by ‘the image of a super-Brain’ commanding ’Let there be light’ and creating the world with all its species, Daphne‘s understanding of evolution is contained in the passages which follow. Whatever may have brought about life, it ‘has had second and third thoughts when working out problems‘.
Evolution
‘What cannot adapt is scrapped. The first insects, the first reptiles, were too large, too cumbersome. They became redundant. Giant bats with wings and claws that pawed the sky were mistakes and - to use a modern term - were scrubbed, along with the lumbering mammals glimpsed by our first ancestors. Plants, fishes, birds, apes are tried, found wanting, vanish. Races die out. Civilisations crumble. Not because an Almighty Ruler deals out punishment to offending sinners, but because certain particles of matter have failed to adapt to the changing circumstances of a particular period.’ (p.111)
So here we have her take on survival of the fittest by natural selection, followed by how she sees this developing into modern human morality, with man’s ‘awareness of others, the feeling for his young shared by all birds and beasts, enabling him to keep his unit strong’.
‘The bird that trails its wing to avert danger to its chick and deceives the pursuer, the lioness that guards the cub, the woman who snatches her child from the road on the approach of a car, these things are done from an age long impulse to preserve the species, to adapt, to meet the future; and the chemical change that fires the impulse, the charge of adrenalin into the bloodstream that directs the action, these are all part of our inheritance, transmuted from those first particles that gave us life. I do not see what all this has to do with God unless God is another name for Life - not omnipotent, not unchanging, but forever growing, forever discarding old worlds and creating new ones.’ (p.111)
Daphne was fascinated by our past and its effects on our present and future. This applies not only to our recent and ancestral past as in the next quotation, but also in the most distant past of the universe (or universes).
‘In our beginning is our end. The colour of our eyes, our skin, the shape of our hands, the depth of our emotions, the bump of humour or lack of it, the small talents we may put to good account, even the ill-health that suddenly in later life descends without apparent reason - these are the things that make us what we are. There is no cell in our bodies that has not been transmitted to us by our ancestors, and the very blood group to which we belong may predispose us to the disease that finally kills. We are all of us chemical particles, inherited from not only our parents but from a million ancestors; and because we beget in turn, passing on to our descendants at best a doubtful, sometimes a disturbing legacy.’ (p.109 -110)
The Cosmos
‘If the particles that we now are came originally from an explosion in or near the sun, and the sun itself from yet another explosion in a kindred universe, then there is no limit either to the past or to the future, life of some sort is continuous, it has no beginning and no end. Our world may burn, disintegrate: there will be others. New explosions will form from new particles which will unite. Life will go on. Creation is at work, has always been at work.’ (p.110)
What her conception of the cosmos seems to encompass here is an endless cycle of Big Bangs and Big Crunches in a multitude of universes, more akin to the cosmology of Buddhism clearly described recently in the Dalai Lama’s The Universe in a Single Atom, than in Abraham Jewish, Christian, Islamic theology.
The Future of the Human Species
Interested in the possibilities opening up in science such as the ‘exciting, even exhilarating new science of genetics’, Daphne was attracted to the idea that not only would science develop our understanding of the world, it might also contribute to our development both physically and mentally as human beings. Today scientists are questioning whether or not evolution has come to an end for human beings. One view is that we have now stopped evolving physically, with our technological and medical advances cutting us off from the force of natural selection and survival of the fittest. Another is that we have become an animal which now evolves mentally and socially rather than physically. Yet another is that we are in the early stages of taking control of our own evolution, deciding for ourselves how we are going to develop as a species.
No doubt influenced by experiences in her own family of what they called ‘dreaming true’, she pondered the possibility of ESP, telepathy, precognition, or as she preferred to call it ‘a sixth sense’, perhaps part of the as yet undiscovered capacity of the brain which we are now delving into, like the ‘blind sight’ ability of some blind people’s brains to detect and respond to things which they cannot see. She said believed there to be a faculty, an inner untapped power ‘not yet pinpointed by science’ which ‘to date’ scientists were either not yet prepared to acknowledge or at least recognise the importance of‘’. It was important to her. She hoped for its eventual transformation of the human condition, while admitting to dangers in such things as ’so-called spiritualism and quack hypnosis’.
Transhumanism
Daphne du Maurier had an optimistic view of the possible future of humanity. She claimed to believe all things possible but only when they can be scientifically proved. Are we about to take control of our own evolution to improve our species in the way the advocates of Transhumanism suggest? Transhumanism is a product of the 1980s when Daphne was first writing her essay about her beliefs. It supports the use of science and technology to improve the human species itself, transforming us in ways which change our condition with regard to suffering, disability, disease, aging; and our physical and mental capacities. Cyborgs, androids, bionic post-humans might no longer be confined to science fiction.
Should we see Transhumanism as a great advance or a great threat? It would at least have provided inspiration for Daphne du Maurier who, well known as a writer of historical fact and fiction, might have added futuristic speculation to her wide-ranging work.
Notes
A major biography of Dame Daphne du Maurier, 1907 to 1989, is Margaret Forster’s Daphne du Maurier, Arrow 1994.
A comprehensive examination of her work is The Daphne du Maurier Companion edited by Helen Taylor, Virago 2007.
From around the time of Daphne du Maurier’s anniversary in 2007, a large part of her fictional and non-fictional work has been republished by Virago Press: www.virago.co.uk
The article The Mysterious Humanism of Daphne du Maurier, which was featured on the du Maurier website during 2007, can be found at:
www.devonhumanists.org.uk/book_reviews/daphne_du_m
An annual 10 day Daphne du Maurier Festival is held at Fowey in Cornwall during May: www.dumaurier.org/festival.html
Dalai Lama The Universe In A Single Atom: How Science And Spirituality Can Serve Our World, Abacus 2006.
Information on Transhumanism can be found on Wikipedia and from www.transhumanism.org
Better Than Well: The Humanity+ (the World Transhumanist Association) is an international non-profit membership organization which advocates the ethical use of technology to expand human capacities. We support the development of, and access to, new technologies that enable everyone to enjoy better minds, better bodies and better lives. In other words, we want people to be better than well.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/3672739/H
Matthew Dennison
Published: 12:01AM BST 19 Apr 2008
How Daphne du Maurier
Wrote Rebecca
Suspicion within Daphne du Maurier's own marriage fuelled the tense, macabre plot of Rebecca, says Matthew Dennison
In 1937, Daphne du Maurier signed a three-book deal with Victor Gollancz. She was 30 years old, the author of four previous novels, including, most recently, Jamaica Inn. She knew already the title of the first of the books she would write for Gollancz: Rebecca. Beyond that point, she had scarcely thought.
On and off for the past five years she had been toying with an idea. Its theme was jealousy.
It came to Daphne the year she married Frederick "Boy" Browning, whom she called Tommy. Tommy had been engaged before - to glamorous, dark-haired Jan Ricardo. The suspicion that Tommy remained attracted to Ricardo haunted Daphne.
She accepted from Gollancz an advance of £1,000 - the equivalent of 18 months of Tommy's pay as a Lieutenant Colonel of the Grenadier Guards - and prepared to set to work.
Nothing came. The paper in her typewriter remained blank. Sluggishly, she wrote 50 pages, all consigned to the waste-paper basket. To Gollancz she wrote a desperate apology: "The first 15,000 words I tore up in disgust and this literary miscarriage has cast me down rather..."
Daphne was in Alexandria with Tommy, the Second Battalion of the Grenadier Guards and a crowd of English expats she loftily dismissed as "horrible Manchester folk". Waking from a dream into the bright light of a foreign hotel, the narrator of the novel with which she struggled so hopelessly would find herself "bewildered at that glittering sun, that hard, clean sky".
In Egypt that summer Daphne, too, was bewildered: unnerved by the climate, the landscape and the prescriptive regimental social life. Gollancz expected her manuscript on her return to Britain in December. "I'm ashamed to tell you that progress is slow on the new novel," she wrote to him. "There is little likelihood of my bringing back a finished manuscript in December."
Without Daphne's failure of maternal instinct, Rebecca would never have been written.
"I am not one of those mothers who live for having their brats with them all the time," she wrote later. She and Tommy had departed for Alexandria on 30 July, leaving behind them four-year-old Tessa and the three-month-old Flavia.
On their return, Daphne straight away formulated a plan to spend Christmas apart from her daughters. Child-free quiet was the only hope for Rebecca. She was not, she assured her own mother, "a brute".
In her daughters' absence she worked quickly. Eighty years ago this month, no more than four months after she started work, Daphne delivered her manuscript.
If she was characteristically hesitant about Rebecca's qualities, her hesitation was not shared by anyone in Victor Gollancz's office. Her editor, Norman Collins, reported simply: "The new Daphne du Maurier contains everything that the public could want."
Gollancz did not hang around. He ordered a first print run of 20,000 copies and within a month Rebecca had sold more than twice that number. It remains Daphne du Maurier's best-loved novel, continuously in print through eight decades.
In 1993, when Susan Hill published her sequel to Rebecca, Mrs De Winter, du Maurier's US publishers Avon estimated ongoing monthly paperback sales of Rebecca at more than 4,000 copies. No mean feat for a novel whose writer haltingly described it as "a bit on the gloomy side", and which V S Pritchett, in the Christian Science Monitor of 14 September 1938, predicted would be here today, gone tomorrow.
Coyly and with a degree of considered obfuscation, Daphne du Maurier "remembered" Rebecca's gestation in The Rebecca Notebook of 1981. "Seeds began to drop. A beautiful home... a first wife... jealousy, a wreck, perhaps at sea, near to the house... But something terrible would have to happen, I did not know what..."
She categorised Rebecca as a study in jealousy, although she admitted its origins in her own life to few. She feigned surprise at the novel's enduring popularity, but was vocal in her disappointment when Gollancz failed to honour subsequent novels with print runs reflecting Rebecca's commercial success.
Agatha Christie earned her ire by echoing the question so many readers had asked her: why does the narrator have no name?
Perhaps du Maurier looked with greater amusement on reports that Field Marshal Rommel kept a copy of Rebecca at his headquarters: though ultimately it would not be used, the Nazis mined Rebecca as the source for a code for German agents infiltrating Cairo.
Rebecca is, as Daphne intended it, "about a young wife and her slightly older husband, living in a beautiful house that had been in his family for generations".
Its nameless narrator is traditionally identified with Daphne herself - she has "a very lovely and unusual name" which people frequently misspell; she is shy and socially ill at ease. In Monte Carlo she falls in love with a handsome, inscrutable man old enough to be her father.
Maximilian de Winter, like the narrator, is staying at the Hôtel Côte d'Azur. He encounters the narrator in her role as paid companion to an exacting American matron, Mrs Van Hopper.
An air of mystery clings to de Winter. He is a man on the run, desperate to escape the shadows of the past, the memories and associations of his beautiful Cornish house, Manderley. He proposes marriage, the narrator accepts. They return to Manderley and the ghosts of de Winter's past.
The house hides dark secrets. All concern de Winter's first wife, Rebecca, a triumphantly lovely creature - like Jan Ricardo. Norman Collins reported to Victor Gollancz that Rebecca "brilliantly creates a sense of atmosphere and suspense" and Manderley is as much an atmosphere as a tangible erection of stones and mortar.
Both house and novel acquire a dream-like quality. Into this steps the nightmarish figure of Mrs Danvers, gothic housekeeper and devoted Rebecca acolyte. Mrs Danvers unsettles the second Mrs de Winter, who finds herself overmastered by Manderley - its grandeur, its memories, its personnel and, most of all, its master, whose behaviour here seems so remote, so changed.
Du Maurier's storytelling instinct was better developed than her prose style and the plot crackles. The pages fly. Tension and suspense mount. As she wrote in her notes prior to beginning work, "I want to built up the character of the first [wife] in the mind of the second... until wife 2 is haunted day and night... a tragedy is looming very close and CRASH! BANG! something happens."
That something involves hatred, adultery, shipwreck and deceit. To bring about the novel's happy ending demands no less than the reader's collusion in a husband's murder of his wife.
Rebecca contains elements of romance, murder mystery and the gothic novel: it defies easy categorisation, but parallels with Jane Eyre are unavoidable. Its plot - like Rebecca's boat at the centre of its mystery - is less than wholly watertight. Yet it worked in 1938, when Victor Gollancz was able to market is as "an exquisite love story", and it works today.
Readers unmoved by the second Mrs de Winter's surrender to Maxim respond to Rebecca's darker face - as Daphne described it, "a sinister tale about a woman who marries a widower... Psychological and rather macabre".
Daphne du Maurier found Egypt no place for romance or suspense. In bright rented rooms in Alexandria, inspiration failed her. The sun of North Africa seared into her imagination an image of unconventional exoticism, a "sleeping" Cornish mansion with which she had already fallen in love and which later would become her home for quarter of a century - Menabilly, the novel's Manderley.
Rebecca is a love letter to a lost homeland; it is a story about the balance of power between men and women. Like Virginia Woolf's Orlando, written the previous decade, it is a hymn to a vanished race of men who were somehow larger and better than mere mortals.
Rebecca is, of course, a study in jealousy. But it is also about holding on to happiness: "I wanted to go on sitting here, not talking, not listening to the others, keeping the moment precious for all time". Repeatedly it lures the reader towards that dreamer's goal, at the same time acknowledging its impossibility: "We can never go back again, that much is certain."
Daphne and Tommy Browning, like Rebecca and Maximilian de Winter, were not faithful to one another. Jan Ricardo, tragically, died during the Second World War. She threw herself under a train.
The real ghost of Manderley
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/donotmigrate/36
By Justine Picardie
Published: 12:01AM GMT 24 Feb 2008
A troubled marriage, illicit loves, a spooky Cornish house?… Daphne du Maurier's life had all the ingredients of one of her own stories. Which is why Justine Picardie used her as the inspiration for her own latest novel. Here she attempts to unravel du Maurier's tangled affairs, while we present an exclusive extract from 'Daphne'
Extract from 'Daphne' by Justine Picardie
'Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again.' Daphne du Maurier's famous opening line of Rebecca - one of the most memorable first sentences ever published - appears to beckon the reader through a padlocked iron gate and down a long, serpentine drive to a hidden mansion, a house of secrets and dreams.
When du Maurier wrote those words, she was far away from her beloved Cornwall, exiled to a foreign country, like her nameless narrator. 'I was 30 years old when I began the story,' she wrote, more than four decades later, 'in the fall of 1937 [when] my soldier husband, Boy Browning, was commanding officer of the Second Battalion, Grenadier Guards, which was stationed in Alexandria, and I was with him. We had left our two small daughters, the youngest still a baby, back in England in the care of their nanny…'
Yet in an odd twist of homesickness, what she missed most was not her children, but an abandoned house - Menabilly, which she had fallen in love with long before her marriage, dreaming of rescuing it from ruin - and it was this that she summoned up as the mysterious Manderley.
Manderley, like its inhabitant, Rebecca - a ghost as alive as the house itself - was at the heart of what became an enormously successful novel which was subsequently adapted into a Hitchcock film in 1940. And it was with the proceeds from Rebecca that du Maurier was able to lease Menabilly in 1943, so that she could move into the place that had provided her with such inspiration.
She could never fully possess the house - it had been entailed to the Rashleigh family for 800 years, and still continues to be - but it possessed her, almost as if it were an elusive lover. By 1957, du Maurier had written two more novels set in Menabilly - The King's General, based on the history of the house as a Royalist stronghold during the Civil War, and My Cousin Rachel, in which it provided not only the setting, but a key part of the plot, in a story of a woman as enigmatic and compelling as Rebecca.
Thus, 20 years after she had written Manderley into life, du Maurier was living in the house at the end of that twisting drive; a haunted, shadowy place hidden from the road and the sea, surrounded by dense woodland and a headland of sheer cliffs and jagged rocks. Her reclusive reputation was well-established by then - Menabilly was never open to sightseers; its gates remained closed to all but du Maurier's closest family and friends. Yet in July 1957, she was due to hold a party there to celebrate her silver wedding anniversary with her husband, who was by then a lieutenant general, honoured with a knighthood and a senior position at Buckingham Palace as treasurer to the Duke of Edinburgh.
Sir Frederick Browning - known to his military colleagues as 'Boy' and to his family as 'Tommy' - was a charismatic and dashing man; as handsome and patrician as Lawrence Olivier's screen portrayal of the hero of Rebecca, Maxim de Winter. And the story of his and Daphne's engagement is as romantic as any of her novels; indeed, it was brought about by her first book, The Loving Spirit, a fictionalised account of a Cornish boat-building family, written by du Maurier soon after her father bought a holiday house overlooking the Fowey estuary in the 1920s.
Tommy Browning was 34, a decade older than Daphne, when he sailed to Fowey in 1931, on leave from his regiment, a journey he was inspired to make after reading The Loving Spirit. The two did not meet, though Daphne and her elder sister, Angela, spotted the attractive-looking Army major on his boat, Ygdrasil.
The following spring, Tommy returned to Fowey, still in search of the girl who had written The Loving Spirit. Introductions were made - his father had met her father at the Garrick Club; he had been at Eton with her cousins - and so began a swift courtship. In her diary for 8 April, 1932, du Maurier wrote: 'A fine bright day with a cold wind. In the afternoon I went out with Browning in his boat. It was the most terrific fun, the seas short and jumpy, and he put his boat hard into it, and we got drenched with spray...
'He's the most amazing person to be with, no effort at all, and I feel I've known him for years.' Just over three months later, on 19 July, they were married nearby, at Lanteglos church, and then set off aboard Tommy's boat to the Helford River and Frenchman's Creek, where they spent a honeymoon lapped by the waves. 'We couldn't have chosen anything more beautiful,' wrote du Maurier in her diary.
A quarter of a century later, du Maurier and Browning still appeared to be the most loving and charming of couples. She was beautiful, rich and famous, as well as an apparently devoted wife, entertaining Prince Philip when he came to stay at Menabilly, and accompanying Browning to Balmoral when they were invited there by The Queen. Yet just as a du Maurier novel is never quite what it seems - danger is always lurking close to the surface; a kiss can cut like a knife - her marriage to Browning was under threat, and both of them were at breaking point.
It is at this moment in du Maurier's life that I have chosen to begin my novel, Daphne - a book which is itself inspired by the blurring of fiction and reality in her own writing - when she discovered, just over a fortnight before her wedding anniversary, that Browning had suffered a catastrophic mental breakdown. He collapsed in London at the beginning of July 1957, and was hospitalised in a private nursing home near Harley Street, where it quickly became clear that he had been drinking too much, and was suffering from liver damage. Soon afterwards, du Maurier received a phone call from a woman who told her that she and Browning were in love, and that his breakdown had been triggered by the stress of concealing the affair.
Du Maurier was terribly shocked by the news, but there was no question in her mind that they should separate, nor that his trusted position at Buckingham Palace be undermined - indeed, she kept the truth from nearly everyone around her, aside from her closest family and two trusted friends, Maureen and Monty Baker-Munton. Everybody else was told that Browning was suffering from nervous exhaustion, and that his blood was going too slowly through his system. But du Maurier's own sense of guilt and spiralling anxieties became evident when she spoke to Maureen (Browning's personal assistant, whose husband, Monty, a former Spitfire pilot, was as loyal to the du Mauriers as she was).
For like Browning - and so many of her fictional personae - du Maurier had her own secrets to hide, including a wartime affair with a married man, Christopher Puxley, and two intense relationships with women, Nell Doubleday (the wife of her American publisher) and Gertrude Lawrence (the actress, who had not only appeared as the romantic lead in du Maurier's play, September Tide, but had previously been one of her father's lovers).
'It was like being faced with a great jigsaw puzzle,' du Maurier wrote to Maureen, in a long and anguished letter soon after Browning's breakdown, in which she reported her attempts to confess her own infidelities to her husband: '[I said to him] how to blame I had been for so much of his unhappiness during the past years, and came clean about the Puxley man, and then tried to explain in easy language for him to grasp how my obsessions - you can only call them that - for poor old Ellen D. and Gertrude were all part of a nervous breakdown going on inside myself, partly to do with my muddled troubles, and writing, and a fear of facing reality.'
But what was the reality that du Maurier feared facing? This is a question I have attempted to address in my novel - and the choice of fiction to explore the mysteries of her past is in part an acknowledgement that one can never know the entire truth of another's life. There has been a much speculation about her bisexuality (a subject thoroughly covered in Margaret Forster's perceptive 1993 biography).
It seems, however, that the intricate ambiguities of her love life (or lives) only begin to make sense when one considers the complexities of her relationship with her father, Sir Gerald du Maurier; for while there has never been conclusive proof that he expressed explicitly incestuous desire for his daughter, his extreme possessiveness veered towards the inappropriate. Thus when du Maurier announced, at the age of 25, that she and Browning were to be married, her father is said to have burst into tears and cried, 'It's not fair!'
He died less than two years afterwards, at the age of 61, though not before he had read du Maurier's novel The Progress of Julius, published in the year after her marriage, which describes a father who drowns his 25-year-old daughter because he cannot bear the prospect of her involvement with another man. Du Maurier's description of his incestuous feelings was remarkably open in a novel of that period - Julius's wife is shocked by his 'voracious passion' for their adolescent daughter, and when he watches her playing the flute, he is himself aware of 'an odd taste in his mouth, and a sensation in mind and body that was shameful and unclean'. (According to du Maurier's son, Kits Browning, 'It's a fascinating story, with an awful lot based on Daphne's father. Julius is utterly ruthless, but he has a magnetism and charm.')
She was the second of Gerald's three daughters, and his favourite, growing up in a sophisticated London household, the adored child of a celebrated actor who ran his own successful troupe at Wyndham's Theatre. From the start, it might have been difficult for du Maurier to face reality - or at least, to know where fantasy took over from the truth, for hers was a family imbued with theatricality and high drama.
Her parents' romance began on stage - her mother, Muriel, was a pretty young actress when she was cast opposite Gerald as the romantic lead in J.M. Barrie's play The Admirable Crichton, and Barrie went on to write a number of other plays and stories for du Maurier's family: most famously, Peter Pan, which was inspired by her cousins, the five Llewellyn Davies boys, and starred Gerald as a menacing double-act of Captain Hook and Mr Darling.
The du Mauriers formed a tight-knit group, with family nicknames and code words: 'menacing', for example, was slang for sexual attraction, which provides an intriguing context to du Maurier's own, sinister stories, where sex and murder often go hand in hand, and desire can lead to death by drowning. It therefore makes a certain sort of warped sense that at 14, on a family holiday beside the sea in Devon, she fell in love with her father's friend and nephew, her handsome cousin, Geoffrey, also an actor, and at 36 far closer in age to Gerald than Daphne.
He was already married to his second wife by then, but appears to have enjoyed the illicit flirtation with his adolescent cousin. 'As the August holiday progressed so did the understanding, and this was something that must not be told to others,' wrote du Maurier, nearly six decades later, '…and after lunch, when we all lay out on the lawn like corpses to catch the sun, rugs over our knees, Geoffrey would come and lie beside me, and feel for my hand under the rug and hold it…'
Later, the hand holding progressed to passionate kisses, when Geoffrey came to stay at the du Maurier family home, Cannon Hall in Hampstead, while his wife was convalescing in a nursing home. Du Maurier wrote in her diary at the time, 'When the others go to bed I let him kiss me in the drawing-room… It seems so natural to kiss him now… The strange thing is it's so like kissing D[addy]. There is hardly any difference between them. Perhaps this family is the same as the Borgias. D[addy] is Pope Alexander, Geoffrey is Cesare, and I am Lucretia. A sort of incest.'
Marrying Browning was, perhaps, du Maurier's way of escaping the confusion of these relationships. He was upright, honourable and courageous - he had been awarded a DSO for bravery during the First World War - and a commander of men in a milieu very different from her father's. A quarter of a century later, however, unsettling similarities between Gerald and Browning had surfaced: both drank too much, both had affairs and suffered from debilitating bouts of black depression, despite the polished demeanour they presented to the outside world. But even more disturbing to du Maurier were her mounting fears that her husband might mirror Maxim de Winter (a character who also bears some resemblance to her father; especially in Lawrence Olivier's portrayal of him in the film version of Rebecca).
'I don't want to resurrect Rebecca,' she wrote to Maureen Baker-Munton in July 1957, yet seemed to be doing exactly that, suggesting in the same letter that her husband could, 'in a blind rage, shoot me as Maxim shot Rebecca, and put my body in Yggie [Browning's boat], and take Yggie out to sea, and then the old tragedy be re-enacted, and when he married, as he would in time [the second wife would] be haunted by my ghost… The evil in us comes to the surface.'
And if Browning was de Winter, then was it Rebecca's face that she saw when she looked in the mirror at night, or did the ghost of Rebecca walk beside her, down the long corridors of Menabilly? These were the unquiet thoughts that haunted Daphne du Maurier, as she awaited her husband's return from hospital; this was the breaking point that she had reached, alone in her house of secrets, behind a locked iron gate, surrounded by woods where the leaves whispered like voices, and beyond the trees were the beckoning waves. What happened next would take an entire book to unfold in full - a novel that I have therefore written...
http://readingrebecca.blogspot.com/2007/11/daphne-
Curtis Moffat
'Daphne Du Maurier'
About 1925
Gelatin silver print
Museum no. E.1558-2007
The writer Daphne du Maurier (1907-1989) sat for Moffat early in her career.
http://www.strandmag.com/rebecca.htm
http://orangetintedglasses.typepad.com/orangetinte
Dusting Off du Maurier
August 07, 2008
A few days ago, Cynthia Crossen noted in the Wall Street Journal that literary history had slighted British author Daphne du Maurier (1907–1989). This is undoubtedly true. For most of the twentieth century, millions of readers checked out her books from libraries, saw her stage plays, or cringed in darkened theatres to movie versions of Jamaica Inn, Rebecca,or The Birds (taken from her short story “Don’t Look Now”). I have read at least nine of her novels and two non-fiction works, Mary Anne (about her great-great-grandmother) and The Infernal World of Branwell Brönte (demolishing the silly idea that the only Brönte who could write was the feckless brother). I’ve been dusting off some of these books and have picked up two new ones, The Parasites (1949) and The Flight of the Falcon (1965), and can happily confirm that all my enthusiastic impressions of du Maurier remain intact.
The general consensus among critics maintains that while she wrote well and had a rare gift for storytelling and creating atmosphere, that du Maurier was essentially a first-tier middlebrow author. Having read rather extensively of late in this so-called middlebrow group (of which the incomparable Virago reprinted many authors in the 1980s), it's certain that no one reading, say, Betty Miller, will think they're reading George Eliot. And though du Maurier’s Rebecca is often compared to Jane Eyre, it is doubtful that the twentieth-century author ever intended to reinterpret or update Charlotte Brönte’s novel. Living as she did in an age of Freudian psychology and totalitarian threats, du Maurier didn’t have to plagiarize other novels to understand how to write about obsessive personalities or repressed individuals seeking release.
Du Maurier has been described as gothic or romantic, and certainly she did return repeatedly to motifs such as stormy moonlight scenes, mysterious houses, and brooding, handsome men. However, if she was nothing more than a modern Mrs. Radcliffe, we wouldn’t still be reading her. In Flight of the Falcon, for example, I’ve encountered a steely side of du Maurier that has been something of a surprise. Though the novel takes place in the medieval town of Ruffano amid ducal palaces and cathedrals, the monomaniacal brother of the main character reads as much more threatening than Rebecca’s Max de Winter. Who does this guy think he is, surrounding himself with alienated young men in doublets and hose and perpetrating demeaning pranks on the town’s leading citizens?
In The Parasites, an exceptional study of a dysfunctional family, the selfish natures of brother and sister Niall and Maria are simply shocking—as is their incestuous relationship. Clearly, there were trends in European postwar society that du Maurier captured in her fiction, such as the heedless drive for prosperity, a growing callousness among young people, and the insidious anxiety caused by nameless Cold War threats. Escapist she might be (but do we read fiction for any other reason?), but she was also remarkably bold in delving into the dark recesses of human nature and suavely displaying the results for our perhaps oblivious enjoyment.
