Daphne du Maurier

Author profile

born

May 13, 1907 in London, The United Kingdom

died

April 19, 1989

gender

female

website

http://www.dumaurier.org

genre

Literature & Fiction, Mystery & Thrillers, Historical Fiction

About this author

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If Daphne du Maurier had written only Rebecca, she would still be one of the great shapers of popular culture and the modern imagination. Few writers have created more magical and mysterious places than Jamaica Inn and Manderley, buildings invested with a rich character that gives them a memorable life of their own.

In many ways the life of Daphne du Maurier resembles that of a fairy tale. Born into a family with a rich artistic and historical background, the daughter of a famous actor-manager, she was indulged as a child and grew up enjoying enormous freedom from financial and parental restraint. She spent her youth sailing boats, travelling on the Continent with friends, and writing stories. A prestigious publishing house accepted her firs...more If Daphne du Maurier had written only Rebecca, she would still be one of the great shapers of popular culture and the modern imagination. Few writers have created more magical and mysterious places than Jamaica Inn and Manderley, buildings invested with a rich character that gives them a memorable life of their own.

In many ways the life of Daphne du Maurier resembles that of a fairy tale. Born into a family with a rich artistic and historical background, the daughter of a famous actor-manager, she was indulged as a child and grew up enjoying enormous freedom from financial and parental restraint. She spent her youth sailing boats, travelling on the Continent with friends, and writing stories. 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, who married her.

Her subsequent novels became bestsellers, earning her enormous wealth and fame. While Alfred Hitchcock's film based upon her novel 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 or 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 or 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. The nameless heroine has been saved from a life of drudgery by marrying a handsome, wealthy aristocrat, but unlike the Prince in Cinderella, Maxim de Winter is old enough to be the narrator's father. The narrator thus must do battle with The Other Woman - the dead Rebecca and her witch-like surrogate, Mrs Danvers - to win the love of her husband and father-figure. The fantasy of this novel is fulfilled when Maxim confesses to the narrator that he never loved Rebecca; indeed, he hated her, a confession that allows the narrator to emerge triumphantly from the Oedipal triangle.

The Freudian subtext of Rebecca is embodied in a for(less)

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Books by Daphne du Maurier

Average rating: 4.05 · 110,810 ratings · 8,237 reviews · 110 distinct works

	Rebecca 4.13 avg rating — 87,988 ratings — published 1938	My rating:
	Jamaica Inn 3.74 avg rating — 4,828 ratings — published 1936 — 19 editions	My rating:
	My Cousin Rachel 3.81 avg rating — 4,289 ratings — published 1951 — 46 editions	My rating:
	Frenchman's Creek 3.80 avg rating — 2,435 ratings — published 1941 — 41 editions	My rating:
	The House on the Strand 3.79 avg rating — 2,118 ratings — published 1968 — 27 editions	My rating:
	The Scapegoat 3.81 avg rating — 1,119 ratings — published 1957 — 29 editions	My rating:
	The Birds And Other Stories 3.97 avg rating — 1,058 ratings — published 1952 — 16 editions	My rating:
	Don't Look Now 3.82 avg rating — 1,451 ratings — published 1971 — 31 editions	My rating:
	The King's General 3.80 avg rating — 770 ratings — published 1947 — 25 editions	My rating:
	The Glass-Blowers 3.49 avg rating — 523 ratings — published 1963 — 17 editions	My rating:

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Quotes by Daphne du Maurier

“I wish I was a woman of about thirty-six dressed in black satin with a string of pearls.”
― Daphne du Maurier, Rebecca

334 people liked it

“Happiness is not a possession to be prized, it is a quality of thought, a state of mind.”
― Daphne du Maurier

tags: happiness

233 people liked it

“If only there could be an invention that bottled up a memory, like scent. And it never faded, and it never got stale. And then, when one wanted it, the bottle could be uncorked, and it would be like living the moment all over again.”
― Daphne du Maurier, Rebecca

tags: books , fiction

214 people liked it

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Polls

Which book would you like to see as the selection for our Winter 2010-2011 Group Reads category Suspense?

Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier

42 votes, 30.0%

Columbine by Dave Cullen

26 votes, 18.6%

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson

19 votes, 13.6%

The Woman in Black: A Ghost Story by Susan Hill

19 votes, 13.6%

Don't Blink by James Patterson

10 votes, 7.1%

The Woods by Harlan Coben

9 votes, 6.4%

Digital Fortress by Dan Brown

7 votes, 5.0%

Tell No One by Harlan Coben

3 votes, 2.1%

Bury Your Dead by Louise Penny

3 votes, 2.1%

Death and the Devil by Frank Schatzing

2 votes, 1.4%

140 total votes

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