Daphne du Maurier

13 May 1907 (London) - 19 April 1989 (Par, Cornwall). Novelist.

Born as the second of three daughters of Sir Gerald Hubert Edward Busson du Maurier (1873-1934) and his wife Muriel (1881-1957), who was an actress. Daphne du Maurier was mainly educated at home by governesses. Later she spent three terms at a finishing school near Paris.

In 1932 she married Frederick Arthur Montague ("Boy") Browning (1896-1965), and in 1933 had a daughter, Tessa, her second daughter Flavia (1937) and her son Christian (1940). In 1947 she fell in love with Ellen Doubleday, to whom she wrote passionate love letters. Yet, she insisted that she wasn´t lesbian but simply “a boy of eighteen all over again” (Auerbach). When Ellen Doubleday did not respond, Daphne du Maurier began an affair with Gertrude Lawrence until Gertrude´s sudden death in 1952. Du Maurier claimed that not she herself but the boy within her fell in love with these women. In 1969 Daphne du Maurier was awarded the title "Dame Commander of the British Empire".

In 1965 her husband died and that loss made her suffer from depression. Until 1977 she produced only two more novels and one volume of her autobiography, Growing Pains (1977). In 1981 she had a nervous breakdown and after that a mild coronary. Daphne du Maurier died of heart failure in Par, Cornwall on 19 April 1989. She was cremated and her ashes scattered at Kilmarth (her home from 1969-1989).

Writing

From early childhood on Du Maurier wrote stories and poetry, encouraged by her father. At the age of twenty-two she had completed several short stories. Her first published story was “And now to God the Father”, which appeared in The Bystander in 1929, which dealt with her cynical view of society.

She then set about to write her first novel. She began writing it in 1929-30 at Bodinnick, Cornwall in their family´s country home. There she wrote The Loving Spirit, which was published in February 1931. Her fourth book, a frank biography of her father Gerald, written after his death in 1934, had the greatest impact. It was published by Victor Gollancz, with whom she entertained a productive partnership. He recognized Daphne du Maurier's strength to create works with strong narrative drive and dense atmosphere and encouraged her to develop these strengths, which resulted in the work Jamaica Inn (1936). It became a bestseller.

In 1936 she was obliged to go abroad to Egypt with her husband, who served in the army. In Egypt she wrote Rebecca (1938) which was “hailed as a romantic novel in the tradition of Jane Eyre” (Forster), though du Maurier meant it to be a study of jealousy, which she herself experienced with a former fiancée of her husband. Rebecca was adapted into a movie 1940 by Alfred Hitchcock and by the BBC in 1978.

In 1943, while her husband was fighting in the Second World War, Du Maurier lived with her children near Par, Cornwall. In 1944 she wrote the play The Years Between, which dealt with the effects of war on a marriage, a consequence she herself experienced with her husband gone because gradually she felt estranged from him.

Her career flourished with the works such as My cousin Rachel (1951) and adaptations of her novels into films, such as Jamaica Inn (1939), Rebecca (1940), Frenchman´s Creek (1944) and Hungry Hill (1946). Her short story "The Birds" was adapted by Alfred Hitchcock in 1963. This short story “may, however, prove her most lasting monument” (Ousby 276).

Du Maurier felt that her later serious works were was not given enough credit. The Scapegoat (1957) was treated as a mere romantic thriller. She then turned to writing biographies to prove that she could produce serious works.

Daphne du Maurier is often dismissed as serious author because her novels are so easy to read. In the mid-1990´s only Rebecca, of all her thirty-eight books remained in print. In the following decade almost all her novels were again available in the United States and Great Britain. During her lifetime, 13 of her novels can be found on world wide bestseller lists.

Influences

Though she herself claims that contemporary writers such as Katherine Mansfield, W. Somerset Maugham, Guy de Maupassant and Mary Webb were her main literary influences, her father and grandfather, were even greater influences on her writing. Her last novel The House on the Strand (1969) is a variation of one of her grandfather's romances. She also often modeled her male protagonists after her father.

After he father´s death she set about to write his biography, which was astonishingly frank in depicting her father as glamorous but also his mistresses, his instability, his demanding character and his terror of aging. In this biography she refers to herself as third person and dedicated the book to her father and his family.

In Mary Anne (1954) she resurrected her family´s ancestry in depicting her grandfather Georges´ maternal grandmother Mary Anne Clarke, who was a great manipulator. Mary Anne was a former English prostitute, who became an infamous courtesan in the Regency period and mistress of the Prince Friedrich August, Duke of York, son of King George III. When the Duke cast her off she blackmailed him with love letters and he then paid her a generous subsidy, which supported the entire next generation of Du Mauriers.

Selected Works

Novels

The Loving Spirit (1931)

I´ll Never Be Young Again (1932)

The Progress of Julius (1933)

Jamaica Inn (1936)

Rebecca (1938)

Frenchman´s Creek (1941)

Hungry Hill (1943)

The King´s General (1946)

The Parasites (1949)

My Cousin Rachel (1951)

Mary Anne (1954)

The Scapegoat (1957)

The House on the Strand (1969)

Rule Britannia (1972)

Biographies

Gerald: A Portrait (1934)

The Du Mauriers (1937)

The Young George du Maurier: A Selection of His Letters, 1860-1867 (1951)

The Infernal World of Branwell Bronte (1960)

The Winding Star: Francis Bacon, His Rise and Fall (1976)

Memoirs

Growing Pains (1967)

The Rebecca Notebook and other Memories (1981)

Plays

The Years Between (1945)

September Tide (1949)

Stories

"Come Wind, Come Weather" (1940)

"The Apple Tree"(1952)

"Happy Christmas"(1953)

"Early Stories" (1955)

"The Breaking Point" (1959)

"Not after Midnight" (1971)

"Echoes from the Macabre" (1976)

"The Rendezvous and Other Stories"(1980)

"Classics of the Macabre" (1987)

Works Cited

Auerbach, Nina. “du Maurier, Daphne”. The Oxford Encyclopedia of British Literature. Ed. David Scott Kastan, Oxford University Press, 2005. http://www.oxford-britishliterature.com/entry?entry=t198.e0148 (accessed 9 January 2012).

Forster, Margaret. “Du Maurier, Dame Daphne (1907 – 1989)“. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Oxford University Press, 2004. http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/39829

Ousby, Ian. “Du Maurier, Dame Daphne”. The Wordsworth Companion to Literature in English. Ed. Ian Ousby. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988. 276-277.

Stieve, Rebecca. "Du Maurier, Daphne". Das Buch der 1000 Bücher. Werke, die die Welt bewegten. Gütersloh: Mohn Media Mohndruck, 2005. 315-316.