Daphne Du Maurier - Novels, Short Stories and Biographies

Novels, Short Stories and Biographies

Literary critics have sometimes berated du Maurier's works for not being "intellectually heavyweight" like those of George Eliot or Iris Murdoch. By the 1950s, when the socially and politically critical "angry young men" were in vogue, her writing was felt by some to belong to a bygone age. Today, she has been reappraised as a first-rate storyteller, a mistress of suspense. Her ability to recreate a sense of place is much admired, and her work remains popular worldwide. For several decades she was the most popular author for library book borrowings.

The novel Rebecca, which has been adapted for stage and screen several times, is generally regarded as her masterpiece. In the U.S. she won the National Book Award for favourite novel of 1938, voted by members of the American Booksellers Association. One of her strongest influences here was Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë. Her fascination with the Brontë family is also apparent in The Infernal World of Branwell Brontë, her biography of the troubled elder brother to the Brontë girls. The fact that their mother had been Cornish no doubt added to her interest.

Other significant works include The Scapegoat, The House on the Strand, and The King's General. The last is set in the middle of the first and second English Civil Wars. Though written from the Royalist perspective of her adopted Cornwall, it gives a fairly neutral view of this period of history.

Several of her other novels have also been adapted for the screen, including Jamaica Inn, Frenchman's Creek, Hungry Hill, and My Cousin Rachel (1951). The Hitchcock film The Birds (1963) is based on a treatment of one of her short stories, as is the film Don't Look Now (1973). Of the films, du Maurier often complained that the only ones she liked were Alfred Hitchcock's Rebecca and Nicolas Roeg's Don't Look Now. Hitchcock's treatment of Jamaica Inn involved a complete re-write of the ending to accommodate the ego of its star, Charles Laughton. Du Maurier also felt that Olivia de Havilland was wrongly cast as the anti-heroine of My Cousin Rachel. Frenchman's Creek fared rather better in a lavish Technicolor version released in 1944. Du Maurier later regretted her choice of Alec Guinness as the lead in the film of The Scapegoat, which she partly financed. In 1989, Indian director Pavithran adapted her short story "No Motive" from the collection The Rendezvous and Other Stories (1980) for his critically acclaimed mystery thriller Utharam (Answer).

Du Maurier was often categorised as a "romantic novelist" (a term she deplored), though most of her novels, with the notable exception of Frenchman's Creek, are quite different from the stereotypical format of a Georgette Heyer or a Barbara Cartland novel. Du Maurier's novels rarely have a happy ending, and her brand of romanticism is often at odds with the sinister overtones and shadows of the paranormal she so favoured. In this light, she has more in common with the "sensation novels" of Wilkie Collins and others, which she admired.

Du Maurier's novel Mary Anne (1954) is a fictionalised account of the real-life story of her great-great-grandmother, Mary Anne Clarke née Thompson (1776–1852). From 1803 to 1808, Mary Anne Clarke was mistress of Frederick Augustus, Duke of York and Albany (1763–1827). He was the "Grand Old Duke of York" of the nursery rhyme, a son of King George III and brother of the later King George IV.

The central character of her last novel, Rule Britannia, is an aging and eccentric actress who was based on Gertrude Lawrence and Gladys Cooper (to whom it is dedicated).

It was in her short stories that she was able to give free rein to the harrowing and terrifying side of her imagination; "The Birds", "Don't Look Now", "The Apple Tree" and "The Blue Lenses" are exquisitely crafted tales of terror that shocked and surprised her audience in equal measure. As her biographer Margaret Forster wrote: 'She satisfied all the questionable criteria of popular fiction, and yet satisfied too the exacting requirements of "real literature".' Her stories read like classic tales of terror and suspense but written with a sure touch for character, imagery and suggestive meaning. They are a borderline case of where pop becomes art.

A more recent discovery of a collection of du Maurier's forgotten short stories, written when the author was 21, provides an intriguing insight into the writer she was to become. One of them, "The Doll", is a suspense-driven gothic tale about a young woman's obsession with a mechanical male sex doll; it has been deemed by du Maurier's son Kits Browning as being "quite ahead of its time".

Perhaps more than at any other time, du Maurier was anxious as to how her bold new writing style would be received, not just by her readers (and to some extent her critics, though by then she had grown wearily accustomed to their often lukewarm reviews) but also by her immediate circle of family and friends.

In later life, she wrote nonfiction, including several biographies that were well received. This, no doubt, came from a deep-rooted desire to be accepted as a serious writer, comparing herself to her neighbour, A.L. Rowse, the celebrated historian and essayist, who lived a few miles away from her house near Fowey.

Also of interest are the family novels/biographies that du Maurier wrote of her own ancestry, of which Gerald, the biography of her father, was most lauded. Later she wrote The Glass-Blowers, which traces her French ancestry and gives a vivid depiction of the French Revolution. The du Mauriers is a sequel of sorts describing the somewhat problematic ways in which the family moved from France to England in the 19th century and finally Mary Anne, the novel based on the life of a notable, and infamous, English ancestor—her great-grandmother Mary Anne Clarke, former mistress of Frederick, Duke of York.

Her final novels reveal just how far her writing style had developed. The House on the Strand (1969) combines elements of "mental time-travel", a tragic love affair in 14th century Cornwall, and the dangers of using mind-altering drugs. Her final novel, Rule Britannia, written post-Vietnam, plays with the resentment of English people in general and Cornish people in particular at the increasing dominance of the U.S.

In late 2006, a previously unknown work titled And His Letters Grew Colder was discovered by Ann Willmore of Bookends of Fowey. This was estimated to have been written in the late 1920s and takes the form of a series of letters tracing an adulterous, passionate affair from initial ardour to deflated acrimony.