Abstract
Unlike J. B. Priestley, Daphne du Maurier was a ‘born novelist’. She came from a famous and well-connected family of artists, actors and writers, but finding London society uncongenial, fled to Cornwall in her early twenties where she was inspired to write. Her first novel, The Loving Spirit (1931), proved successful and with Rebecca, published in 1938, she became one of the most famous best-selling authors of the day.1 Even though her work continues to sell, its cultural significance is often overlooked, partly because as an author of middlebrow fiction for women, she is not taken seriously, and possibly even more so because of the strong focus in most discussions of du Maurier — or ‘Daphne’ as her fans are wont to speak of her — on the author’s biography. Certainly du Maurier herself set up some of the more ‘romantic’ autobiographical details like a smoke screen to satisfy her readers while protecting her privacy. Some accounts, such as when she discovered Menabilly, or when handsome ‘Boy’ Browning, her future husband, came sailing into Fowey Harbour, are repeated with fetishistic glee and, yes, the gate and drive described in Rebecca are exactly as she saw them when in search of Rashleigh’s elusive mansion. This mimetic furore has all but obscured any wider cultural concerns.2 Alison Light’s Forever England, published in 1991, is the only study to discuss in detail du Maurier’s work in the context of interwar discourses of Englishness.
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Notes
For biographies and monographs on Daphne du Maurier, see Judith Cook, Daphne: a Portrait of Daphne du Maurier (London: Bantam, 1991);
Alison Light, Forever England (1991);
Margaret Forster, Daphne du Maurier [1993] (London: Arrow, 1994);
Flavia Leng, Daphne du Maurier: a Daughter’s Memoir (Edinburgh and London: Mainstream Publishing, 1994);
Avril Homer and Sue Zlosnik, Daphne du Maurier: Writing, Identity and the Gothic Imagination (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1998);
Nina Auerbach, Daphne du Maurier: Haunted Heiress (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000).
See for example Daphne du Maurier, Enchanted Cornwall: Her Pictorial Memoir (London: Penguin and Pilot, 1989), ed. Piers Dudgeon with photographs by Nick Wright. This memoir interweaves episodes of du Maurier’s life with her novels and picturesque photographs of Cornish scenes, explaining the inspiration for each novel and giving a rather sanitized account of both life and work.
Light, ‘Daphne du Maurier’s Romance with the Past’, in: Forever England (1991), 156–207;
For an earlier version of the chapter see Light, ‘“Returning to Manderley”: Romance Fiction, Female Sexuality and Class’, in: Feminist Review 16 (1984), 7–25.
Du Maurier, Enchanted Cornwall (1989), Foreword.
Among the few critical analyses of du Maurier’s work, one focus has been on class. In Forever England (1991) Alison Light sees du Maurier in the interwar period as catering to a snug, private middle class in need of escapist fantasies as supplied by the author’s ‘romance with the past’. Malcolm Kelsall, in ‘Manderley Revisited: Rebecca and the English Country House’, in: Proceedings of the British Academy, 82 (1993), 303–15,
sees her as an ‘upwardly mobile writer’ afraid of the ‘proletariat’ (310). Other studies have emphasized gender and psychology. See, for example, Tania Modleski, ‘“Never to be Thirty-six Years Old”: Rebecca as Female Oedipal Drama’, in: Wide Angle 5:1 (1982), 34–41;
Mary Ann Doane, ‘Caught and Rebecca: the Inscription of Femininity as Absence’, in: Constance Penley (ed.), Feminism and Film Theory (New York and London: Routledge and BFI Publishing, 1988), 186–215;
Auerbach, Daphne du Maurier (2000). Homer A. and Zlosnik A., in Daphne du Maurier (1998), have made the most persistent attempt to place du Maurier in the tradition of gothic literature.
Cook, Daphne (1991), 230.
For extended discussions of these issues see Forster, Daphne du Maurier (1994),
Zlosnik and Homer, Daphne du Maurier (1998)
and Auerbach, Daphne du Maurier (2000).
Quoted in Brome, J. B. Priestley (1988), 178.
J. W. Dunne, An Experiment With Time [1927/1929/1934] (Basingstoke: Papermac, 1981), Note on the Second Edition, 8.
Cook, Daphne (1991), 40.
As she is usually classed as a writer of women’s romance fiction, the strong supernatural element in du Maurier’s writing often goes unacknowledged. Neil Wilson’s Shadows in the Attic: a Guide to British Supernatural Fiction 1820–1950 (Boston Spa and London: The British Library, 2000) offers a substantial bibliography of supernatural writing which includes neither George nor Daphne du Maurier, although by rights it should, according to its definition of the supernatural. Highbrow artists and writers tend to explore new techniques of painting and narrative while middlebrow writers like Priestley and du Maurier engage with the new ideas on the plot level, as do writers of science fiction.
Alison Light also points to this: ‘In this imagination every family becomes a kind of lineage and it is not an ancestral home which is threatened with loss but family itself which must be protected as the central way in which individuals make sense of themselves and social changes. Families become the true histories, a connective sense of the past which makes it organic like a “family tree”, with “roots” and “branches”, where we can place ourselves.’ Light, Forever England (1991), 194.
The dedication runs: ‘In the belief that there are thirty-one descendants of Louis-Mathurin Busson du Maurier and his wife Ellen Jocelyn Clarke alive to-day, this story of the past is dedicated to all of them, with affection.’ In terms of family history, the account is in fact rather iconoclastic, because Daphne du Maurier emphasizes the important role of the disreputable Mary Anne Clarke and explodes the family myth that ‘du Maurier’ was an aristocratic name. In fact, the Bussons had taken the name from a farm estate where they lived, called ‘le Maurier’. Du Maurier edited her grandfather’s letters in 1951, revisited family history with the novels Mary Anne (1954), The Glass Blowers (1963) and, somewhat obliquely, The Parasites (1949). She also published Gerald: a Portrait (1934), a rather outspoken biography of her father written shortly after his death. Family history and biography was also a favourite subject for her non-fiction; she wrote a biography of Patrick Branwell Brontë, The Infernal World of Branwell Brontë (1960) and studies of the Bacon family — Golden Lads: Anthony Bacon, Francis and their Friends (1976) and The Winding Stair: Francis Bacon, his Rise and Fall (1976), all published by Gollancz. When Daphne du Maurier died in 1989, her children reacted in the family spirit. Her beloved son Christopher (‘Kits’), who had contributed photographs to his mother’s writings on Cornwall, went to live with his family in Ferryside, the du Maurier’s first house in Cornwall, and her younger daughter Flavia wrote a biography of her mother, or rather an account of their family life. It is an intriguing and often moving account, candid, laconic, unflinching and sometimes critical, but also generous and humorous. In characteristic du Maurier style, the account begins: ‘I dream often that my mother is still alive. I suppose the unconscious mind is not yet reconciled to the fact that she is dead.’ The book ends with a kind of apotheosis: ‘I feel I have no “roots” left, that they were blown away when Tessa, Kits and I scattered Bing’s ashes over her chosen spot, above the Cornish cliffs, the fitful April sun shining bright upon the calm and distant sea. A lone gull mewed a final farewell overhead, and as we three stood there we did not mourn, for we knew that our beloved Bing was free at last to go to that “never never land”, where she had always believed that “Daddy” would be waiting in his boat for her and together they would sail into infinity.’ Leng, Daphne du Maurier, 11; 206.
See Cook, Daphne (1991), 68–9.
Daphne du Maurier, The Du Mauriers (London: Gollancz, 1937), 330–1.
Ibid., 334. For the importance of the English Channel/la Manche in literature and cultural history, see Dominic Rainsford, Literature, Identity and the English Channel: Narrow Seas Expanded (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002). Rainsford notes that a number of authors, among them William Wordsworth, experienced ‘the Channel as the physical correlative of a fractured family life’ (29). Rainsford does not mention du Maurier, but his statement is certainly true of her. As Rainsford concludes, the Channel ‘lets fresh air and water into a particular part of the world, but it symbolises the monitory and invigorating effects that might be associated with borders everywhere: geographical moments where identities are interrupted or exchanged, but, for a while, not taken for granted, and open to supplementation and renewal’ (159).
Daphne du Maurier, The Loving Spirit [1931] (London: Arrow Books, 1994), 11, 16.
For the Victorian connection of femininity with spiritualism, see Alex Owen, The Darkened Room: Women, Power and Spiritualism in Late Victorian England (London: Virago, 1989).
See Forster, Daphne du Maurier (1994), 158ff. Frenchman’s Creek is singled out as ‘the only one of my novels that I am prepared to admit is romantic’. Du Maurier, Enchanted Cornwall (1989), 89. Du Maurier often said that she tried to lift the wartime gloom by revisiting her enchanting honeymoon on Tommy’s boat Ygdrasil in Frenchman’s Creek. Of course, the fact that she was also working through her attraction to Christopher Puxley was not meant to become public. The novel is dedicated to Puxley and his wife Paddy.
Daphne du Maurier, Frenchman’s Creek [1941] (London: Arrow Books, 1992), 11–12. Subsequent page numbers will be given in the main text.
See Jeffrey Richards, Films and British National Identity from Dickens to Dad’s Army (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1997), 125.
On the issue of marital relations, see Carol Smart, ‘Good Wives and Moral Lives: Marriage and Divorce 1937–51’, in: Christine Gledhill and Gillian Swanson (eds), Nationalising Femininity: Culture, Sexuality and British Cinema in the Second World War (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996), 91–105.
Smart also discusses Brief Encounter. For an interesting empirical study (based on questionnaires) of attitudes about love, sex, marriage, children, law, religion and morality in the years after World War Two, see Geoffrey Gorer, Exploring English Character (London: The Cresset Press, 1955).
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© 2010 Ina Habermann
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Habermann, I. (2010). Dreamtime in Cornwall. In: Myth, Memory and the Middlebrow. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230277496_8
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