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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 accep...moreIf 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: 4.03 · 89,282 ratings · 7,563 reviews · 82 distinct works

	Rebecca 4.11 avg rating — 70,094 ratings — published 1938 — 146 editions	My rating:
	Jamaica Inn 3.72 avg rating — 4,089 ratings — published 1936 — 51 editions	My rating:
	My Cousin Rachel 3.80 avg rating — 3,720 ratings — published 1951 — 44 editions	My rating:
	Frenchman's Creek 3.80 avg rating — 2,057 ratings — published 1941 — 40 editions	My rating:
	The House on the Strand 3.77 avg rating — 1,828 ratings — published 1968 — 27 editions	My rating:
	Scapegoat 3.80 avg rating — 959 ratings — published 1957 — 26 editions	My rating:
	The Birds And Other Stories 3.96 avg rating — 824 ratings — published 1952 — 15 editions	My rating:
	Don't Look Now 3.81 avg rating — 1,204 ratings — published 1971 — 30 editions	My rating:
	The King's General 3.81 avg rating — 642 ratings — published 1947 — 24 editions	My rating:
	The Glass-Blowers 3.46 avg rating — 444 ratings — published 1963 — 17 editions	My rating:

More books by Daphne du Maurier…

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

310 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

206 people liked it

“Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again.”
― Daphne du Maurier, Rebecca

tags: dream

181 people liked it

See all Daphne du Maurier's quotes »

Polls

Which book would you like to read for our April 15 - May 15 European Royalty group read?

The Glass-Blowers by Daphne du Maurier

9 votes, 29.0%

King, Kaiser, Tsar Three Royal Cousins Who Led the World to War by Catrine Clay

6 votes, 19.4%

The Many Lives & Secret Sorrows of Josephine B. by Sandra Gulland

5 votes, 16.1%

Tale of Two Cities, A by Charles Dickens

5 votes, 16.1%

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell by Susanna Clarke

4 votes, 12.9%

Desiree by Annemarie Selinko

1 vote, 3.2%

August 1914 by Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn

1 vote, 3.2%

31 total votes

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