Daphne du Maurier was born on 13

I’ll Never Be Young Again was different in style and content to her first book. It was a contemporary novel, and she drew on her own experiences and observations to write it. It was the first of five novels that she wrote in which the narrator, in the first person, was a man, a skill that she used to great effect. The book tells the story of a young man finding himself and learning about
relationships. Its narrative is divided into two distinct parts; the first part is about the young man’s passionate friendship with a man a few years older than himself and the second part is about his love affair with a young woman.
One of the people to read The Loving Spirit was a young army officer called Frederick Browning, known to his family as Tommy and his fellow army officers as Boy. Boy sailed, and he and a friend came down to Fowey with the specific intention of finding the pretty young woman who has written such a marvellous book.
It was to be Boy’s second visit to Fowey before he met Daphne and they became close straight away. Daphne proposed to Boy, and they were married in the tiny church at Lanteglos, close to Ferryside three months later. They honeymooned on Boy’s boat Ygdrasil, on the Helford River, and then life
took a new turn as Daphne began married life as an army officer’s wife.
Daphne had always been a fairly solitary girl, happiest with her own thoughts, her writing and the outdoor life she loved to lead, so marriage and the need to consider her husband and her role as his wife did not come easily to her. She also soon discovered that her handsome military husband suffered from night terrors as a result of the horrors he had encountered in WW1 and was a complex character, very much in need of her support.
The year following their marriage was an eventful one for Daphne, as she struggled to become a good army officer’s wife and her third novel The Progress of Julius (1933), later renamed as Julius, was published. The idea for it formed when Daphne was in Paris in early 1931, and she continued it on her return to Ferryside in March of the same year. The book took nine months to write and was the last of her novels to be published by Heinemann. The plot and writing style that Daphne used
for this book were different again from her first two novels and told the life story of a French Jewish man called Julius Levy. It is a chilling story of a fascinating but intrinsically evil man who achieves wealth and status by using and discarding everyone in his path. Daphne researched the history of the 1870 war between France and Prussia and the siege of Paris for the early chapters of the book, but the main relationship between Julius and his daughter was drawn from Daphne's relationship with her father.
1933 was also the year she gave birth to her first child, a little girl called Tessa. Daphne had been bought up in a household full of staff, and she too had people to carry out a lot of the work for her. In particular, she always had a nanny for her children and slightly distanced herself from their day to day care.
The following year brought sadness when Gerald died after a short illness and an operation for cancer from which he never really recovered. Very quickly after his death, Daphne felt that she needed to write his biography and set to work straight away. This book, Gerald: A Portrait (1934), was published by Victor Gollancz Ltd, who published all Daphne’s work from then on, and it proved to be a candid view of Gerald’s life. Some of Gerald’s contemporaries were concerned and hoped their daughters would not be quite so frank when they died!
Daphne’s next novel was Jamaica Inn (1936) most of which was written in Frimley, in Surrey, where Boy was based. The storyline itself brewed from an outing that had taken place some years previously when Daphne and her friend Foy Quiller-Couch went riding on Bodmin Moor. They were lost in bad weather conditions and sheltered for some time in a derelict cottage on the moor but were eventually led back to Jamaica Inn by their horses. During that stay at Jamaica Inn Daphne also met and talked to the vicar from the nearby church at Altarnun. Jamaica Inn was Daphne’s most successful novel to date.
During 1936 Daphne started work on another biography, this time about her ancestors and called The du Mauriers (1937). From the early days of her marriage, she had found her role as the wife of a senior army officer difficult, and the role of wife to the commanding officer even more so. But when they were posted to Egypt in 1936, the heat, the different way of life and the responsibility she faced were very daunting. Daphne travelled to Egypt with little Tessa and her nanny Margaret in March 1936, and they moved into a house in Alexandria, which had an excellent housekeeper, who relieved Daphne of all domestic worries.
The letters that Daphne wrote to family and friends such as Foy Quiller-Couch indicate how unhappy she was in Egypt, but to the people that she associated with, during that time, she appeared calm and positive. Everyone knew she was a writer, and this allowed her to be a little separate from everyone else. She continued her work on The du Mauriers in the blistering summer heat of Egypt and by the time the book was completed, and on its way back to Victor Gollancz in England, she was quite unwell. A visit from the doctor confirmed that she was, in fact, not ill but pregnant again.
Daphne needed to get away from the heat of Egypt so a holiday in the mountains of Cyprus was arranged and the family set off in September. Information is a little sketchy as to whether Daphne had completed The du Mauriers before she went to Cyprus or whether she took her work with her and there is very little mention of Daphne’s time in Cyprus in British biographies. However, it seems likely that she had completed that book before she went and was beginning to brew the story that was to become Rebecca while she was away. Certainly, Rebecca was developed from her longing for England and particularly the little part of Cornwall where she was happiest, and her stay in the cooler and more peaceful setting of Cyprus made her feel closer to her life in Cornwall again.

Daphne and Boy’s entry in the Forest Park Hotel visitors book

The time in Cyprus was a great success and an idyllic interlude during which time Daphne could relax, read, walk and come to terms with her pregnancy, in the cool mountain air. There are several references locally to her visit including an entry in the visitors book at the Forest Park Hotel, in which Daphne and Boy said they had spent four and a half happy peaceful weeks at the hotel. There is no doubt that the holiday in Cyprus helped Daphne to cope with the remainder of her time in Egypt until she was able to return to England for the birth.

Daphne, Tessa and Margaret travelled back to the UK together, but then Daphne went down to Fowey alone for a while before returning to London for the birth of her second daughter Flavia. Boy also had leave due and was able to return to the UK for a few weeks to spend time with family and meet his new daughter. When they returned to Egypt Daphne and Boy decided that Margaret and
the children should remain in England, with Boy’s sister Grace acting as guardian.
Once back in Egypt, Daphne attempted to make serious inroads into her new novel. She said to Victor Gollancz that it was
… going to be about the influence of a first wife on the second, she is dead before the book opens. Little by little, I want to build up the character of the first in the mind of the second, until wife two is haunted day and night, a tragedy is looming very close and crash! bang! something happens, it’s not a ghost story.
However, things did not go well, and for the first time in her career as a writer, Daphne took the first 15,000 words, tore them up and started again, although she hated going over the ground again it was the only thing to do to get the novel moving in the direction she wanted.
Although Daphne wrote part of Rebecca in Egypt, she completed it at Greyfriars, the house they moved into near Fleet, in Hampshire, near to where Boy had been posted. She sent the manuscript to Victor Gollancz in April 1938 and Rebecca was published in August. Daphne’s American publisher Nelson Doubleday published the US edition in September, and the book took off as a hugely successful novel on both sides of the Atlantic. Daphne was suddenly a big earner and financially very secure, a fact that Boy accepted with his usual pragmatism as he knew that as a Lieutenant-Colonel in the Grenadier Guards he could never earn the sort of money that his wife could. Boy Browning had much more worrying things to think about than money, he could see the war clouds gathering
again, and after his experiences, in the First World War, he was deeply concerned about what was about to happen next in the world.
Of course, the Second World War did begin within less than a year, and the lives of everyone, not only the du Maurier Browning family, would never be the same again. Boy became busier and busier and worked harder and longer hours until he was rarely at home. The decision was made that Daphne, Margaret, Tessa and Flavia should go and stay as paying guests with a couple called the Puxleys in their beautiful Lutyens house in Hertfordshire. Here they were considered to be safely away from London but still close enough for Boy to visit should he have a spare moment.
Daphne had become involved with the Moral Re-Armament Group and, through them, made her own small contribution to the war effort by writing a collection of short stories each of which had a theme which would encourage people to be brave and keep going no matter how bad things seemed. The stories were published in local newspapers up and down the country and were collected into a small book called Come Wind, Come Weather (1940), which was sold to raise money for the Soldiers’, Sailors’ and Airmen's Families Association. Editions of the book were sold in several allied countries including India, Canada and the USA.
Christopher Puxley, Daphne’s host, was unable to join up for military service because of health reasons and he proved to be a charming and relaxed companion, very different to Boy, who was by then heavily weighed down by the amount of work and responsibility with which he had to cope. Paddy, Christopher’s wife, worked for the Red Cross, the Women’s Voluntary Service, and was also looking after two evacuee children. Tessa and Flavia adored her, and everything seemed very congenial. During her stay with the Puxleys Daphne, who was expecting her third child, moved out for the birth and then returned when her new little son Christian (known a Kits) was a few weeks old. During this time Daphne was also writing her next novel Frenchman’s Creek (1941).