Daphne Du Maurier
Recently I was speaking at a plenary session of a literary festival on Great Authors of the Twentieth Century.
My co-speaker, a literary academic from Corpus Christi College Cambridge, advocated James Joyce’s Ulysses as the game changer of the century and rather pooh-poohed my choice of Daphne du Maurier.
Over the years I have got used to this but I will never accept her reputation that she is a sentimental writer of historical and romantic fiction. There is a dark side to her and her novels: sexual passion, jealousy, the paranormal are all themes explored and these were places where women novelists were not supposed to go. Above all she could tell a story, not rewrite the rules of story telling, as my co speaker maintained with James Joyce.
In her most famous novel Rebecca the titled character is already dead when the novel begins with Maxim de Witt, Rebecca’s first husband, seeking his second wife in the South Of France where she is a lady’s companion.
The reader is never certain whether Maxim murdered Rebecca. The sinister housekeeper Mrs Danvers obsession with Rebecca borders on the sexual.
The ending is far from happy.
The paranormal is explored in House on the Strand and Don’t Look Now.
One of the remarkable aspects of her writing is how one little incident, a bird troubling a tractor driver could inspire The Birds, or a blind clairvoyant staying in a cottage on the Menabilly Estate where Daphne lived could be the idea for Don’t Look Now
In Frenchman Creek a bored society lady falls for a pirate. This has echoes of Madame Bovary in seeking passion outside a dull marriage.
Daphne du Mauirier is forever associated with Cornwall. Yet the real driver for her extraordinary novels was herself.
Her personality is elusive. She was said to be a recluse. Yet others say she was a warm hostess. She was always thought to be bisexual, she may have had a incestuous relationship with her philandering father yet she the most supportive of wives to Boy Browning whom she married 3 months after he sailed into Fowey harbour.
She had an affaire with a husband whose family put her up during the war yet she was critical of her daughter Tessa when her marriage failed. She seems to be a Bloomsbury where all manner of sexual licence is permitted but divorce never happened. She never appreciated that she only had a lease on the Menabilly Estate from the Rashleigh family and on its expiry in 1966 she was bitter about being rehoused in Kilmarthen House, though this inspired House on the Strand when she came upon a lab there.
Although the Margaret Forster biography is admirably well-researched I prefer Daphne by Jean Picardie. This covers three themes; Daphne researching into the Bronte family, the aunt that raised Charlotte, Emily and Branwell was Cornish: the crisis in her marriage when Boy Browning became severely depressed: a young student writing a thesis on Daphne whose husband disparages her writing compared to Henry James which brings me back to the literary Festival.
112 years after her birth Daphne du Maurier’s novels still endure. Rebecca has never been out of print. Her novels spawned 14 films. There is a reason for this. She is a bloody good writer.
