Frenchman’s Creek/ Daphne du Maurier
Frenchman’ s Creek is Daphne du Muriel’s only historical romance published in 1941. It reflects her ability to convey a sense of location, character and emotion but above all her competence in telling a story. The capacity to plot is one which critics rarely acknowledge but is probably the single greatest driver for readers of fiction. Yet so often not just many novels but films and tv series suffer from an obscure or unnecessarily confused story line.
Here the headstrong and passionate Dona, Lady St Columb, abandons the Court world of Charles 11 in London and her baronet husband Harry a lazy aristo whose main interests are drinking, gambling and wenching with his best friend Rockingham who has designs on the beautiful Dona. She and her young children head off to Navron House on the neglected St Columb estate on the Helford Estuary in Southern Cornwall which is being terrorised by a French pirate Jean – Benoit Aubery.
On a stroll to the creek by the house she encounters the pirate and is surprised to meet a cultivated man who likes to sketch and examines life more deeply than her boorish and dull husband. She falls in love with the pirate and accompanies him on a escapade dressed as a cabin boy. Word of the piracy but not the affaire gets back to husband Harry in London who travels down to Cornwall with Rockingham. Together with the local landowning big-wigs they plot the capture and hanging of the pirate. One of the landowners is Sir Philip Rashleigh whose family then and now is the owner of the Menabilly Estate which Daphne du Maurier leased for many years and was probably living there at the time of writing the novel.
Daphne du Maurier set many of her novels in Southern Cornwall notably her most famous Rebecca. I delayed reading Frenchman’s Creek until after our boat trip last month down the Helford Estuary where the creek is situated. Indeed we visited the very creek in which Daphne du Mauieri honeymooned in 1933 when her husband Boy Browning navigated his yacht there. Aside from evoking the locale Daphne du Maurier depicts the characters well. The only one to realise that Dona’s cover and covert story of illness assisted by the faithful manservant William is a fabrication is the wily and ruthless Rockingham.
The story set some 460 years ago is surprisingly modern. Then and now the Cornishman seems deep down to detest any foreigner, French intrusion on their fishing was far more a reason to leave the EU than the vast subsidies to stay. The woman outmaneuvering men sometimes by flirtation is a ruse we saw in Basic Instinct and almost every film these days has a female lead smarter than the men around her. Daphne du Mauarier would not have known but might have predicted this but as a person she would give full head to her passions. In the novel she has created a flawed character who consorts with a pirate, abandons her children, engages only one manservant Wiiliam at Navron Hisue who is in the employ of the pirate and engages in criminality. Yet like Emma Bovary you root for her for having the courage to turn her back on a dull husband and vacuous life style. The issue would be raised today that, if the 17th century aristo can cavort with fancy woman at taverns, why should not his wife have a passionate affaire? This said I like to think that’s it is du Maurier s ability as a writer rather than the modernity of her themes that continues to attract an enormous and young readership.
The book has spawned both a film with Joan Fontaine , who starred in REBECCA and a tv series. It would be worth another go as its plot line is better than Riviers and Poldark has generated an interest in things Cornish.
