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Daphne du Maurier

Born

in London, The United Kingdom

May 13, 1907

Died

April 19, 1989

Website

https://www.dumaurier.org/

Genre

Literature & Fiction, Mystery & Thrillers, Historical Fiction

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Daphne du Maurier was born on 13 May 1907 at 24 Cumberland Terrace, Regent's Park, London, the middle of three daughters of prominent actor-manager Sir Gerald du Maurier and actress Muriel, née Beaumont. In many ways her life resembles a fairy tale. Born into a family with a rich artistic and historical background, her paternal grandfather was author and Punch cartoonist George du Maurier, who created the character of Svengali in the 1894 novel Trilby, and her mother was a maternal niece of journalist, author, and lecturer Comyns Beaumont. She and her sisters were indulged as a children and grew up enjoying enormous freedom from financial and parental restraint. Her elder sister, Angela du Maurier, also became a writer, and her younger sist Daphne du Maurier was born on 13 May 1907 at 24 Cumberland Terrace, Regent's Park, London, the middle of three daughters of prominent actor-manager Sir Gerald du Maurier and actress Muriel, née Beaumont. In many ways her life resembles a fairy tale. Born into a family with a rich artistic and historical background, her paternal grandfather was author and Punch cartoonist George du Maurier, who created the character of Svengali in the 1894 novel Trilby, and her mother was a maternal niece of journalist, author, and lecturer Comyns Beaumont. She and her sisters were indulged as a children and grew up enjoying enormous freedom from financial and parental restraint. Her elder sister, Angela du Maurier, also became a writer, and her younger sister Jeanne was a painter.

She spent her youth sailing boats, travelling on the Continent with friends, and writing stories. Her family connections helped her establish her literary career, and she published some of her early work in Beaumont's Bystander magazine. A prestigious publishing house accepted her first novel when she was in her early twenties, and its publication brought her not only fame but the attentions of a handsome soldier, Major (later Lieutenant-General Sir) Frederick Browning, whom she married.

She continued writing under her maiden name, and her subsequent novels became bestsellers, earning her enormous wealth and fame. Many have been successfully adapted into films, including the novels Rebecca, Frenchman's Creek, My Cousin Rachel, and Jamaica Inn, and the short stories The Birds and Don't Look Now/Not After Midnight. While Alfred Hitchcock's films based upon her novels proceeded to make her one of the best-known authors in the world, she enjoyed the life of a fairy princess in a mansion in Cornwall called Menabilly, which served as the model for Manderley in Rebecca.

Daphne du Maurier was obsessed with the past. She intensively researched the lives of Francis and Anthony Bacon, the history of Cornwall, the Regency period, and nineteenth-century France and England. Above all, however, she was obsessed with her own family history, which she chronicled in Gerald: A Portrait, a biography of her father; The du Mauriers, a study of her family which focused on her grandfather, George du Maurier, the novelist and illustrator for Punch; The Glassblowers, a novel based upon the lives of her du Maurier ancestors; and Growing Pains, an autobiography that ignores nearly 50 years of her life in favour of the joyful and more romantic period of her youth. Daphne du Maurier can best be understood in terms of her remarkable and paradoxical family, the ghosts which haunted her life and fiction.

While contemporary writers were dealing critically with such subjects as the war, alienation, religion, poverty, Marxism, psychology and art, and experimenting with new techniques such as the stream of consciousness, du Maurier produced 'old-fashioned' novels with straightforward narratives that appealed to a popular audience's love of fantasy, adventure, sexuality and mystery. At an early age, she recognised that her readership was comprised principally of women, and she cultivated their loyal following through several decades by embodying their desires and dreams in her novels and short stories.

In some of her novels, however, she went beyond the technique of the formulaic romance to achieve a powerful psychological realism reflecting her intense feelings about her father, and to a lesser degree, her mother. This vision, which underlies Julius, Rebecca and The Parasites, is that of an author overwhelmed by the memory of her father's commanding presence. In Julius and The Parasites, for example, she introduces the image of a domineering but deadly father and the daring subject of incest.

In Rebecca, on the other hand, du Maurier fuses psychological realism with a sophisticated version of the Cinderella story. ...more

Combine Editions
Daphne du Maurier’s books

Average rating: 4.16 · 963,179 ratings · 77,996 reviews · 472 distinct works • Similar authors

	Rebecca 4.25 avg rating — 703,729 ratings — published 1938 — 44 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	My Cousin Rachel 4.01 avg rating — 66,800 ratings — published 1951 — 41 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	Jamaica Inn 3.90 avg rating — 57,746 ratings — published 1936 — 343 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	Frenchman's Creek 3.99 avg rating — 23,339 ratings — published 1941 — 245 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	The Birds and Other Stories 4.06 avg rating — 14,349 ratings — published 1952 — 117 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	The House on the Strand 3.83 avg rating — 14,342 ratings — published 1969 — 156 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	The Scapegoat really liked it 4.00 avg rating — 12,991 ratings — published 1957 — 163 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	Don't Look Now and Other Stories 3.82 avg rating — 9,463 ratings — published 1971 — 122 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	The Birds 3.90 avg rating — 6,322 ratings — published 1952 — 56 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	The King's General 3.90 avg rating — 5,774 ratings — published 1946	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars

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Polls

July 2017 New School Classic Poll

My Cousin Rachel by Daphne du Maurier, 1951, 352 pgs

45 votes, 13.1%

The Heart is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers, 368 pgs, 1940

35 votes, 10.2%

Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie, 647 pgs, 1981

33 votes, 9.6%

The Outsiders by S.E. Hinton, 1967, 192 pgs

28 votes, 8.2%

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami, 1994, 607 pgs

27 votes, 7.9%

Cannery Row by John Steinbeck, 1945, 185 pgs

25 votes, 7.3%

The Godfather by Mario Puzo, 448 pgs, 1969

25 votes, 7.3%

As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner, 1930, 267 pgs

23 votes, 6.7%

A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole, 1980, 416 pgs

21 votes, 6.1%

Alias Grace by Margaret Atwood, 1996, 636 pgs

17 votes, 5.0%

The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje, 1992, 320

14 votes, 4.1%

The Master of Go by Yasunari Kawabata, 1954, 189 pgs

13 votes, 3.8%

Zorba the Greek by Nikos Kazantzakis, 1946, 335 pgs

11 votes, 3.2%

The Sea Wolf by Jack London, 1904, 425 pgs

10 votes, 2.9%

Main Street by Sinclair Lewis, 1920, 454 pgs

9 votes, 2.6%

Independent People by Halldór Laxness, 482 pgs, 1934

4 votes, 1.2%

Creation by Gore Vidal, 1981, 574 pgs

3 votes, 0.9%

The Street by Ann Petry, 1946, 435

0 votes, 0.0%

343 total votes

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