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DAPHNE
DU MAURIER: A BIOGRAPHY
English novelist, biographer, and playwright, who published romantic
suspense novels, mostly set on the coast of Cornwall. Du Maurier is best
known for REBECCA (1938), filmed by Alfred Hitchcock
in 1940. Orson Welles's radio adaptation from 1938 also paved way for
the success. The novel has been characterized as the last and most famous
imitations of Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre (1847).
"Adventure was here. Adventure was there.
Adventure was in picking up a posy dropped by a lady and offering it to
an old gentleman who patted her head and gave her two-pence. Adventure
was in gazing into pawnbrokers' windows, in riding in wagons when the carter
smiled, in scuffling with apprentice boys, in hovering outside the bookshops,
and when the bookseller was inside, tearing out the middle pages to read
at home, for prospective purchasers never looked at anything but the beginning
and the end." (from Mary Anne, 1954)
Daphne du Maurier was born in London. She came from an artistic family.
Her father was the actor-manager Sir Gerald du Maurier and she was the
granddaughter of caricaturist George du Maurier. One of her ancestors was
Mary Anne Clarke, the mistress of the duke of York, second son of King
George III. She later became the heroine of du Maurier's novel MARY ANNE
(1954). In 1831 Mary Anne Clarke's daughter married Louis-Mathurin Busson
du Maurier. THE GLASS-BLOWERS (1963) was a novel about the Busson family.
Her own father she portrayed in GERALD (1934).
Du Maurier grew up in a lively London household where friends like J.M.
Barrie and Edgar Wallace visited frequently. Her uncle, a magazine editor,
published one of her stories when she was a teenager and got her a literary
agent. Du Maurier attended schools in London, Meudon, France, and Paris.
In her childhood she was a voracious reader, she was fascinated by imaginary
worlds and developed a male alter ego for herself. Du Maurier also had
a male narrator in several novels. Her first book, THE LOVING SPIRIT, appeared
in 1931. It was followed by JAMAICA INN (1936), a historical tale of smugglers,
which was bought for the movies, and directed by Alfred Hitchcock - later
Hitchcock also used her short story 'The Birds', a tense tale of nature
turning on humanity. FRENCHMAN'S CREEK, a pirate romance, was filmed in
1944. MY COUSIN RACHEL (1951) was made into film in 1952. The story examined
how a man may be manipulated by a woman, who perhaps has murdered her husband.
Ambrose Ashley meets the beautiful Rachel Sangaletti, marries her and died
six months later. He has sent letters to his nephew Philip, the narrator,
who first hates Rachel, and then is bewitched by her. Du Maurier leaves
open the question, is Rachel a posoner, or an innocent victim of Ambrose's
and then Philip's paranoid fantasies. The author herself was as puzzled
as her readers, did Rachel kill Ambrose. "Sometimes I think she did, sometimes
I didn't - in the end I just couldn't make up my mind," du Maurier said.
Rachel dies, taking the secret with her, but Philip's role in her death
is clear, and perhaps he is the real murderer of the story.
In 1932 du Maurier married to Lieutenant Colonel Frederick Arthur Montague
Browning II, who was knighted for his distinguished service during World
War II. They were happily married for thirty-three years and had three
children; Browning died in 1965. Du Maurier was made dame in 1969 for her
literary distinction. She died on April 19, 1989. Her pictorial memoir,
ENCHANTED CORNWALL, appeared posthumously in 1992. With her son, Christian,
she published VANISHING CORNWALL in 1967. Like Rebecca, many of
her novels and short stories were set in Cornwall, England's westernmost
county, whose wild, stormy weather and wild past inspired her imagination.
"Here was the freedom I desired, long sought-for, not yet known," she wrote
in Vanishing Cornwall. "Freedom to write, to walk, to wander, freedom
to climb hills, to pull a boat, to be alone." Du Maurier's home was at
a seventeenth-century mansion, Menabilly, overlooking the sea, for a quarter
of a century. The house became the scene of her historical novel THE KING'S
GENERAL (1946).
"'I never can make up my mind about nationalism,
said her grandmother. 'It's inclined to turn fanatical, and the fanatics
make such a point about where one is born. I was born in Wimbledon, and
although I used to adore going to the tennis there in old days I wouldn't
die for it. In fact, it wouldn't worry me if Wimbledon and all its houses
ceased to exist. But I've made this corner of this particular peninsula
my home for a long time now, and I'd centainly die for it if I thought
it would do any good.'" (from Rule Britannia, 1972)
Rebecca's opening line, "Last night I dreamt I
went to Manderley again," is among the most memorable in twentieth-century
literature. The story centers on a young and timid heroine. Her life is
made miserable by her strangely behaving husband, Maxim de Winter, whom
she just have married. Maxim is a wealthy widower. His wife Rebecca has
died in mysterious circumstances. His house is ruled by Mrs. Danvers, the
housekeeper. She has made Rebecca's room a shrine. Du Maurier focuses on
the fears and fantasies of the new wife, who eventually learns, that her
husband did not love his former wife, a cruel, egoistical woman. Because
of the familiar plot, suits of plagiarism were brought against du Maurier,
but they were dropped when the widespread use of the theme, beginning from
Charlotte Brontë's works, was established. Du Maurier's book, on the
other hand, inspired Maureen Freely's novel The Other Rebecca (1996),
in which the enigmatic Maxim de Winter appears as Max Midwinter.
Before Alfred Hitchcock's film project, Orson Welles made a radio dramatization
of Rebecca. It was performed in December 1938 by The Campbell
Playhouse and sponsored by Campbell Soup. The adaptation starts with
Bernard Herrmann's waltz-ladden score but is then interrupted by an "important
message from a man who keeps one eye on the dining table and another on
the pantry..." Welles played Maxim de Winter and Margaret Sullavan the
second Mrs de Winter. The producer David O. Selznick sent a transcript
of the broadcast to Hitchcock. "If we do in motion pictures as fauthful
a job as Welles did on the radio," Selznick wrote, "we are likely to have
the same success the book had and the same success that Welles had."
Besides popular novels Du Maurier published short stories, plays and
biographies, among others Branwell Brontë's, the brother of sisters
Anne, Charlotte and Emily. Her biography of Francis Bacon, an English statesman
in the 1500s and 1600s, appeared in 1976. Du Maurier's autobiography, GROWING
PAINS, was published when she was 70. In the late 1950s, du Maurier began
to take interest in the supernatural. During this period she wrote several
stories, which explored fears and paranoid fantasies, among them 'The Pool',
in which a young girl glimpses a magical world in the woods, but is later
barred from it, and 'The Blue Lenses', in which a woman sees everyone around
her having the head of an animal. In 1970 appeared her second collection
of short stories, NOT AFTER MIDNIGHT, which included 'Don't Look Now',
a tale set in Venice, involving a psychic old lady, a man with the sixth
sense, and a murderous dwarf. A film version of the story, directed by
Nicholas Roeg, was made in 1973.
For further reading: Daphne Du Maurier
by Richard Kelly ( 1987); Daphne: The Life of Daphne du Maurier
by Judith Cook (1991); The Private World of Daphne du Maurier by
Martyn Shallcross (1992); Daphne du Maurier by Margaret Forster
(1993); Daphne Du Maurier: A Daughter's Memoir by Flavia Leng (1995);
Daphne
Du Maurier: Writing, Identity and the Gothic Imagination by Avril Horner,
Sue Zlosnik (1998); Mystery and Suspense Writers, vol. 1, ed. by
Robin W. Winks (1998); Daphne Du Maurier, Haunted Heiress by Nina
Auerbach (1999); - George Du Maurier (1834-96). Artist and illustrator,
born in Paris. Joined the staff of Punch, and gained fame as a satirist.
Wrote and illustrated three novels. He produced his first novel, Peter
Ibbetson (1891), at the age of fifty-six, and then wrote Trilby
(1894), which brought the name of a character, Svengali, to common use.
- Note: Du Maurier's and actress Gertrude Lawrence's love letters
were published in Daphne Du Maurier: The Secret Life of the Renowned
Storyteller by Margaret Forster (1993) - Other film adaptations:
Hungry Hill, dir. by Brian Desmond Hurst, 1946;
The Birds, dir.
by Alfred Hitchcock, script Evan Hunter, 1963; Don't Look Now, dir.
by Nicholas Roeg, 1973. "Birds was slaughtered by Stanley Kauffman in the
New
Republic (April 13, 1963): "The script by Evan Hunter... is absolutely
bereft of even the slick-magazine sophistication that Hitchcock's films
usually have. The dialogue is stupid, the characters insufficiently developed
to rank as cliches, the story incohesive... Suzanne Pleshette as a local
schoolteacher is unobjectionable. The rest of the cast are offensively
bad." -
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