Daphne du Maurier was born on 13

Frenchman’s Creek has been variously described as an adventure story and a romance with a capital “R”. Daphne intended to write something to lighten the mood during the horrors of wartime and to create a narrative that was purely escapist and frivolous. She described it as the only romantic story that she ever wrote, but she was never particularly happy with it. When it was published, it received non-committal reviews, and yet, even though initially it lacked the success of Rebecca, it went on to be one of Daphne du Maurier’s most successful books, probably largely because of its Cornish setting.
Meanwhile, Daphne was developing a romantic attachment for Christopher Puxley, a fact which was observed by Margaret, but not initially by Paddy. When Paddy did realise what was going on Daphne, Margaret and the children had to make a hasty exit, and they all fled down to Fowey.
Ferryside had become a permanent home for Daphne’s mother and two sisters after Gerald had died, but it had been seconded by the US Navy, who were in Fowey preparing for D -Day, so the du Maurier family were living temporarily in a house on the Esplanade in Fowey. Daphne rented a house at Readymoney Beach just a short walk from her mother’s house and set up home there with Margaret, the children and what-ever other help she could muster.
While there Daphne embarked on another novel Hungry Hill (1943), which was a big family saga set
in Ireland and based on Christopher Puxley’s copper mining ancestors. She also started to work on a
plan to gain agreement from Dr Rashleigh, the owner of Menabilly, to rent the property from him. Amazingly, she gained permission to rent Menabilly, was given a twenty-year lease and managed to employ people to work on the house and make it habitable. She moved herself, Margaret and the children in just before Christmas 1943 and employed several young girls from the local villages to help her run this vast house.
During the time it took to restore the house to a reasonable standard Daphne also wrote a play called The Years Between (1945). She had already dramatised Rebecca, which had been a success on the London stage, and her second play proved to be just as successful. It was the story of the wife of Colonel Wentworth, a Conservative MP, who is reported missing presumed dead during the war. His wife goes on to build a life for herself, being appointed MP in his place and finding a new love, only to discover, just as the war is ending, that her husband is not dead after all.
The first novel that Daphne wrote at Menabilly was The King’s General (1946), a historical novel set during the English Civil War in the West Country and narrated by Honor Harris, one of Daphne’s best-drawn female characters. She worked hard on historical research for this book, giving it a strong basis of fact while creating an exciting tale about Richard Grenville, who really was the King’s General in the West, and members of the Rashleigh family living at Menabilly during the time of the Civil War. Daphne dedicated the novel to Boy with the words
To My Husband, also a general but, I trust, a more discreet one.
After the war Boy worked as Military Secretary at the Ministry of War in London for a short while before being appointed Comptroller and Treasurer to Her Royal Highness Princess Elizabeth and her new husband Prince Philip. Later, when King George VI died, and Princess Elizabeth became Queen, Boy’s role within the Royal Family changed, and he was appointed Treasurer to the household of the Duke of Edinburgh, with offices in Buckingham Palace. At no time did Daphne seriously consider the possibility of moving into London to be with Boy, so he stayed in their London flat during the week and travelled home to Menabilly, by train, on as many weekends as was possible.
Meanwhile, problems were brewing for Daphne in the USA. Before the war, there had been some claim that she had plagiarised Rebecca, but now a court case was pending, and she needed to travel to New York to give evidence. The literary executors of a woman called Edwina MacDonald sued Daphne du Maurier, her US publisher Doubleday Doran & Co. and Selznick International Pictures Inc, who had made the film of Rebecca, starring Lawrence Olivier and Joan Fontaine. They claimed that the story of Rebecca had been plagiarised from a short story called I Planned to Murder my Husband, which had later been developed into a novel called Blind Windows. Daphne went through numerous days of questioning in the New York court, but the case could not be proven, and she was able to return home. However, it could not be said that she returned home unscathed because, during her time in New York, she had stayed with the Doubledays and developed feelings for her publisher’s wife, Ellen.
Ellen never reciprocated Daphne’s feelings, but they did maintain a long and deep friendship, which involved a vast correspondence over many years, visits to one another and holidays spent together. Once Daphne was back at Menabilly, she wrote the play September Tide (1949), which was basically about her feelings for Ellen, heavily disguised in a relationship between a mother and her son-in-law. The mother figure, Stella, was played by Gertrude Laurence, and the play was another great success. Daphne is seldom thought of as a playwright, but the three plays that she wrote were all West End successes. Gertrude was another woman that Daphne had strong feelings for, oddly in some ways because Daphne’s father had enjoyed a relationship with her when she had been younger.
Certainly, Daphne was devastated when Gertrude died after a short illness in 1952 aged only 54.
With thoughts of September Tide still in her head, Daphne wrote her next novel The Parasites (1949) about a theatrical family. This book was the first novel that she wrote in her new writing hut in the grounds of Menabilly, situated a little way from the house and with a view of the Gribbin Daymark and the sea from the hut’s window. It was also the only novel that she wrote without planning the whole story into its proposed chapters. The story tells of three adult siblings going back over their
lives, and each sibling is a different facet of Daphne’s personality. It is a very overlooked novel and is
extremely autobiographical, so tells us a lot about Daphne.
Daphne’s next project was to edit a book about her grandfather. Her cousin Peter, one of the five boys about whom the story of Peter Pan had been written, was a publisher. Daphne and Peter decided to collaborate on a book based on the letters their grandfather wrote between 1860 and 1867, the time when he was a young man establishing himself as an illustrator in London and his earliest years of marriage to Emma. The resulting book, called The Young George du Maurier: A Selection of his Letters 1860-67, was published in 1951, as was her next novel My Cousin Rachel. This book was another historical novel, based in part at Menabilly and tells the story of a man and his young ward who live in bachelor bliss until the elder of the two becomes ill and needs to travel abroad. While away, he meets and marries a distant cousin called Rachel and subsequently dies.
Philip, the young ward, then goes through a range of emotions about Rachel, who eventually comes to live with him on the Cornish estate. The book was written so cleverly that you can never be sure if Rachel is good or evil, and indeed Daphne said that she could not decide the answer to that question either.
In 1952 Daphne returned to short stories and published a collection called The Apple Tree, which included The Birds, one of her most famous short stories, because of the Hitchcock film. Her next novel was Mary Anne (1954), based on the true story of Daphne’s great, great, great grandmother, who had been a courtesan and who had enjoyed a relationship with the Prince Regent’s brother Frederick Duke of York.
While Daphne had embarked on several relationships, with Christopher Puxley, Ellen and Gertrude, it cannot be entirely surprising that Boy, up there in London working hard, was also coming in contact with people to whom he was attracted. Indeed, when he was back at Menabilly, he had a fling with a local girl that he went sailing with and who Daphne, rather cruelly, nicknamed Sixpence, but she was largely oblivious to what was going on. In 1956 Daphne started work on a new novel called The Scapegoat (1957). Set mainly in France, this is the story of two men who meet briefly and are identical to one another. A set of circumstances conspire against one of them who then needs
to live the other man’s life. It sounds as if readers would need to suspend belief quite substantially, but the novel worked and made a very successful book and film.
Sadly, trouble was just around the corner. As Daphne prepared for their 25th wedding anniversary Boy collapsed in London with a nervous breakdown. The party was cancelled, and Daphne dashed off to the nursing home in London to see him. Poor, foolish, Boy had been having an affair with Sixpence, but also with a woman in London who Daphne called Covent Garden and possibly with one or two other women. His gilt, the pressure of work, a drinking problem, the exhaustion of travelling from London to Cornwall and back week on week and the approaching Silver Wedding had culminated in a total breakdown. He was a shattered wreck and the sight of him and the gilt that Daphne also held inside herself almost drove her to a breakdown too. But a determination to get things right again and to regain each other's trust and love made them both fight to get back to a level of equilibrium, and to a large extent, they did succeed. Boy had only just gone back to work at Buckingham Palace when Daphne’s mother died, a further blow, which affected her much more than she expected it would.
Daphne realised that she needed to spend more time in London with Boy and made a huge effort to live a life that put him first and her writing second. At this time, she wrote a collection of short stories called The Breaking Point (1959) and felt that they helped her to cope with her feeling of hopelessness as she literally wrote herself out of her own breaking point.
The time had come for Boy to retire and move home full time to Menabilly. Daphne could not imagine what life would be like with Boy at home all the time after so many years of leading very separate lives. She decided that her next book should be a biography of Branwell Bronte, the overlooked brother of Charlotte, Emily and Anne. Daphne felt that to carry out research and write biography rather than more fiction was a more realistic approach for her at a time when Boy still needed her support emotionally. During the writing of The Infernal World of Branwell Bronte (1960), Daphne discovered that Winifred Gerin, a recognised biographer, with a book about Anne Bronte already under her belt, was also writing a book about Branwell. Daphne carried on, with great trepidation, but her book was published first and did at least as well as she hoped. In fact, while Daphne’s biography about Branwell Bronte is still in print, Winifred Gerin’s book has been out of print for years.
Foy Quiller-Couch came up with the next idea for a book. Her father had started a novel called Castle Dor (1962) and put it away in a drawer unfinished. It was the retelling of the local legend of Tristan and Iseult set against a Victorian background with the action taking place in Fowey, along the river and in the countryside around the site of Castle Dor itself. Daphne was a little unsure about
completing something of the great literary man’s work, but with encouragement, for Boy and Foy, she agreed. Boy and Daphne walked together in the footsteps of the book and soaked up the atmosphere as she began to write. She took over the story at chapter 17, but she did also adjust some of the earlier wording so that the story flowed seamlessly from one writer to the next.
The next book Daphne wrote was The Glassblowers (1963), a fictional account of her French ancestors, before and during the French revolution. Her grandfather George had believed that his family was descended from aristocracy, but Daphne’s research proved that her ancestors' name was Busson and they were a family of master glassblowers who took the name du Maurier from a farm called Le Maurier where some of the family of glass-blowers had lived for a time.
The idea for Daphne’s next book The Flight of the Falcon (1965) came after Daphne had visited Urbino in Italy with her son Kits and had also been on holiday in Italy with Tessa. It is a contemporary novel, gripping and suspenseful but fast-moving.
For a while there had been rumblings about the lease on Menabilly and Daphne and Boy’s future in the house, and then Dr Rashleigh died, and the heir to the estate decided that he wanted to live in his house, so the time drew near when leaving Menabilly would become a reality. After much discussion, it was agreed that Daphne and Boy would move to Kilmarth, the dower house to Menabilly, a beautiful, but smaller house less than a mile away with views over St Austell Bay. The negotiations were slow and then very sadly, Esther, Daphne’s housekeeper, lost her husband to a sudden illness. She was only young with a small son to care for, and Daphne felt a deep responsibility and sadness for her. Then Boy also died, and Daphne was suddenly completely lost in grief. Their marriage had endured many ups and downs, but without him, she was devastated.
As Daphne began to recover from the loss of her husband, her son Kits encouraged her to consider writing another book to help her to regain her writing routine. They decided to produce a book about Cornwall together and called it Vanishing Cornwall (1967). The subject matter looked at the many aspects of Cornwall, its history, industry, myths and legends, which Daphne believed were vanishing under the invasion of tourism. Daphne and Kits drove around Cornwall together, while he took the photographs to go with the text that she would write. The book was a great success, has been reproduced in updated editions in 1981 and again in 2007 and is considered to be an important book about Cornwall.
Plans for the move to Kilmarth edged forward slowly. Daphne was insistent that the house must be completely ready before she moved in and that a home would be made for Esther and her son too so that they could all move from Menabilly together. Daphne spent a lot of time at Kilmarth, soaking up the atmosphere and getting used to the idea of living there. She discovered that a man called Professor Singer had lived in the house and in a room in the basement she found his laboratory with jars containing embryos. She also found out that the origins of the house were much earlier than Menabilly dating back to medieval times. A new novel began to brew in Daphne’s mind, taking in the theme of travel back into a medieval past with the aid of a drug, and soon she was writing The House on the Strand (1969). The House on the Strand was published not long before Daphne made the move to Kilmarth and in the long term has become one of her most popular novels among Daphne’s followers.
In June 1969, the month that Daphne moved to Kilmarth she was included in the June Honours List and awarded a DBE, she was secretly thrilled but also embarrassed and said Dame Daphne made her sound like someone out of a pantomime.
Daphne had loved Menabilly more than anything else. Her children tell stories of her hugging the walls, and she was devastated when she had to leave but, in the fullness of time, she became friends with Veronica Rashleigh, who now lived at Menabilly with her husband, and she went back often to visit Veronica and to walk in the grounds of her former home. Meanwhile, she grew a fondness for Kilmarth that she had not expected, and wrote her last novel there. Rule Britannia (1972) is a story about a time when Britain leaves the European confederation and joins in a new alliance with the USA. Far from it being an alliance, it soon becomes clear that America is assuming a dominant role and attempts to subdue the country. However, the Cornish population rebels when American Marines land in Par Bay. This book has recently become extremely popular as it resonates a situation which has become all too familiar to people in Britain.
After Rule Britannia, there was to be no more new fiction, although several compilations of short stories were published. Instead, Daphne turned her had to memoir and biography. She wrote Golden Lads (1975) about Anthony and Francis Bacon and their friends, having researched them very thoroughly. Daphne’s biography tells of how the Bacon brothers were linked to Queen Elizabeth I through their association with the Earl of Essex. Anthony acted as an agent in France, collecting intelligence information for the Earl. Francis was compelled by the Queen to charge the Earl of Essex with treason, leading to his beheading on 25^th February 1601. Anthony died soon after, but Francis lived on and became Lord Chancellor and Lord Keeper, going on to win fame as a writer and philosopher. Daphne enjoyed the research, and the writing of this historical biography so decided to go on and write a further volume The Winding Stair (1976) which continued the story of Francis
Bacon’s life and work.
To celebrate Daphne’s 70^th year, Victor Gollancz Ltd. published a volume of autobiography called Growing Pains: The Shaping of a Writer (1977). Victor had died in 1967, but his daughter Livia took over ownership of the publishing house and continued to work with Daphne. Using the diaries that she had written throughout her childhood and right up until her marriage Daphne pieced together an interesting account of her family life, friendships, and how her writing had developed in that time. Her next book was a memoir called The Rebecca Notebook and Other Memories (1981), in which she included the original notes from when she planned out the storyline of Rebecca and articles on subjects that had been important to her during her life including her views on romantic love, success, death and widowhood. This collection, though not an autobiography as such tells us a lot about Daphne, her strength of character, the things that interested her and her sense of humour.

Daphne du Maurier’s 70^th birthday portrait

In 1987, to celebrate Daphne’s 80^th birthday, Victor Gollancz Ltd published Classics of the Macabre, a collection of her finest short stories beautifully illustrated by Michael Foreman. There was to be no more new material, Daphne was elderly now, and her wonderful brain no longer inspired her to write. This was a tragedy for Daphne, her whole life had been built around her writing for as long as she could remember, and without her work, she was lost. Gradually she withdrew from her friends and indeed life itself, becoming frail and thin and needing lots of care, but she remained at Kilmarth, the home she had grown to love, with its views over St Austell Bay until on 16^th April 1987 she died.

In the thirty years since Daphne’s death, her fame had increased, and peoples love of her writing has
grown from strength to strength. Her books are as modern and relevant today as when they were written. Despite being thought of as ‘a romantic novelist loved by housewives’ during her lifetime, a label that was always entirely inaccurate, she is now recognised as a vitally important writer in the history of British literature and is studied by students at school and university as well as by academics. Much of her work has been made into film or television drama, and any news item about her or relating to her work is pounced on enthusiastically by her many followers. She is a great writer and recognition in her work continues to grow.
Suggested further reading:
Myself When Young: The Shaping of a Writer by Daphne du Maurier, Virago 2004 The Rebecca Notebook and Other Memories by Daphne du Maurier, Virago 2005 Daphne: A Portrait of Daphne du Maurier by Judith Cook, Bantam Press 1991 Daphne du Maurier by Margaret Forster, Arrow Books 1994
Daphne du Maurier and her Sisters: The Hidden Lives of Piffy, Bird and Bing by Jane Dunn, HarperCollins Publishers 2013
Manderley Forever: The Life of Daphne du Maurier by Tatiana de Rosnay, Allen & Unwin 2017
Written for the Cultural Centre, Platres, Cyprus, Summer 2019
© Ann Willmore 2019