Daphne du Maurier
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. The nameless heroine has
“A dreamer, I walked enchanted, and nothing held me back.”
“Do you know so little about children, Monsieur Jean,' she asked, 'that you imagine, because they don't cry, therefore they feel nothing? If so, you're much mistaken.”
“My realisation that all I had ever done in life, not only in France but in England also, was to watch people, never to partake in their happiness or pain, brought such a sense of overwhelming depression, deepened by the rain stinging the windows of the car, that when I came to Le Mans, although I had not intended to stop there and lunch, I changed my mind, hoping to change my mood.”
“The moment of crisis had come, and I must face it. My old fears, my diffidence, my shyness, my hopeless sense of inferiority, must be conquered now and thrust aside. If I failed now I should fail forever.”
“I wonder ... when it was that the world first went amiss, and men forgot how to live and to love and to be happy.”
“You understand now... how simple life becomes when things like mirrors are forgotten.”
“People who travel are always fugitives.”
“Of course we have our moments of depression; but there are other moments too, when time, unmeasured by the clock, runs on into eternity and, catching his smile, I know we are together, we march in unison, no clash of thought or of opinion makes a barrier between us.”
“When she smiled it was as though she embraced the world.”
“As I stood there,hushed and still,I could swear that the house was not an empty shell but lived and breathed as it had lived before.”
“An empty house can be as lonely as a full hotel" he said at length."The trouble is that it is less impersonal.”
“I thought of all those heroines of fiction who looked pretty when they cried, and what a contrast I must make with a blotched and swollen face, and red rims to my eyes.”
“Life was a series of greetings and farewells, one was always saying good-bye to something, to someone.”
“Only a lover of animals will understand the sudden feeling of loss, of emptiness, and the intuitive bond which exists between man and dog, has always existed from the beginning and will, please God, continue to the end.”
“What degradation lay in being young.”
“I might say that we have paid for freedom. But I have had enough melodrama in this life, and would willingly give my five senses if they could ensure us our present peace and security. Happiness is not a possession to be prized, it is a quality of thought, a state of mind of course we have on moments of depression; but there are other moments too, when time, unmeasured by the clock, runs on into eternity.”
“From the very first, I knew that it would be so...I smiled to myself, and said, "That -- and none other.”
“Then all at once she turned to me, her face pale, her eyes strangely alight. She said, “Is it possible to love someone so much, that it gives one a pleasure to hurt them? To hurt them by jealousy, I mean, and to hurt myself at the same time. Pleasure and pain, an equal mingling of pleasure and pain, just as an experiment, a rare sensation?”
“You have qualities that are just as important, far more so, in fact. It's perhaps cheeky of me to say so, I don't know you very well. I'm a bachelor, I don't know very much about women, I lead a quiet sort of life down here at Manderley, as you know, but I should say that kindliness, and sincerity, and if I may say so—modesty—are worth far more to a man, to a husband, than all the wit and beauty in the world.”
“Men and women who have never lived make finer captives on the printed page, or if they have lived, and are historical, then the very knowledge that they belong to a past we have not known ourselves induces fancy.”
“I am aware of sadness, of a sense of loss. Here, I say, we have lived, we have been happy. This has been ours, however brief the time. Though two nights only have been spent beneath a roof, yet we leave something of ourselves behind. Nothing material, . . . but something indefinable, a moment of our lives, a thought, a mood.The house sheltered us, we spoke, we loved within those walls. That was yesterday. To-day we pass on, we see it no more, and we are different, changed in some infinitesimal way. We can never be quite the same again.”
“She would have stood by Giles’s side, and shaken hands with people, a smile on her face. I could not do that. I had not the pride, I had not the guts. I was badly bred.”
“I felt rather exhausted, and wondered, rather shocked at my callous thought, why old people were sometimes such a strain. Worse than young children or puppies because one had to be polite.”
“I did so obediently, and waited for her approval.”
“Every moment was a precious thing, having in it the essence of finality.”
“But the point is this Monsieur...the reason why Madame complains of you is not because of the immorality in itself; but because, so she tells me, you make immorality delicious.”
“But luxury has never appealed to me, I like simple things, books, being alone, or with somebody who understands.”
“We all of us have our particular devil who ruses us and torments us, and we must give battle in the end.”
“I wondered how many people there were in the world who suffered, and continued to suffer, because they could not break out from their own web of shyness and reserve, and in their blindness and folly built up a great distorted wall in front of them that hid the truth.”
“You had to endure something yourself before it touched you.”
“There is no going back in life, no return, no second chance. I cannot call back the spoken word or the accomplished deed.”
“There's a home for you here at North Hill, you know that, and my wife joins me in begging you to stay. Plenty to do, you know, plenty to do. There are flowers to be cut for the house, and letters to write, and the children to scold.”
“Jem was safe from her, and he would ride away with a song on his lips and a laugh at her expense, forgetful of her, and of his brother, and of God; while she dragged through the years, sullen and bitter, the stain of silence marking her, coming in the end to ridicule as a soured spinster who had been kissed once in her life and could not forget it.”
“No, Mary had no illusions about romance. Falling in love was a pretty name for it, that was all.”
“I wondered why it was that places are so much lovelier when one is alone. How commonplace and stupid it would be if I had a friend now, sitting beside me, someone I had known at school, who would say: “By-the-way, I saw old Hilda the other day. You remember her, the one who was so good at tennis. She’s married, with two children.” And the bluebells beside us unnoticed, and the pigeons overhead unheard. I did not want anyone with me. Not even Maxim. If Maxim had been there I should not be lying as I was now, chewing a piece of grass, my eyes shut. I should have been watching him, watching his eyes, his expression. Wondering if he liked it, if he was bored. Wondering what he was thinking. Now I could relax, none of these things mattered. Maxim was in London. How lovely it was to be alone again.”
“Little notes, scrawled on half-sheets of paper, and letters, when he was away, page after page, intimate, their news. Her voice, echoing through the house, and down the garden, careless and familiar like the writing in the book.And I had to call him Maxim.”
“I could fight with the living but I could not fight the dead. If there was some woman in London that Maxim loved, someone he wrote to, visited, dined with, slept with, I could fight her. We would stand on common ground. I should not be afraid. Anger and jealousy were things that could be conquered. One day the woman would grow old or tired or different, and Maxim would not love her anymore. But Rebecca would never grow old. Rebecca would always be the same. And she and I could not fight. She was too strong for me.”
“He lacked tenderness; he was rude; and he had more than a streak of cruelty in him; he was a thief and a liar. He stood for everything she feared and hated and despised; but she knew she could love him... This was no choice made with the mind.”
“When the leaves rustle, they sound very much like the stealthy movement of a woman in evening dress, and when they shiver suddenly, and fall, and scatter away along the ground, they might be the patter of a woman’s hurrying footsteps, and the mark in the gravel the imprint of a high-heeled shoe.”
“I could not ask for forgiveness for something I had not done. As scapegoat, I could only bear the fault.”
“I wish I was a woman of about thirty-six dressed in black satin with a string of pearls.”
“It's funny,' I noted in the diary, 'how often I seem to build a story around one sentence, nearly always the last one, too. The themes are a bit depressing but I just can't get rid of that.”
“Why, he wondered, should he remember her suddenly, on such a day, watching the rain falling on the apple trees?”
“Les images défilaient par centaines derrière mes yeux fermés, chose vues, choses sues et choses oubliées.”
“And this then, that I am feeling now, is the hell that comes with love, the hell and the damnation and the agony beyond all enduring, because after the beauty and the loveliness comes the sorrow and the pain.”
“But I have had enough melodrama in this life, and would willingly give my five senses if they could ensure us our present peace and security. Happiness is not a possession to be prized, it is a quality of thought, a state of mind. Of course we have our moments of depression; but there are other moments too, when time, unmeasured by the clock, runs on into eternity and, catching his smile, I know we are together, we march in unison, no flash of thought or opinion makes a barrier between us.”
“People who mattered could not take the humdrum world. But this was not the world, it was enchantment; and all of it was mine.”
“I would not be young again, if you offered me the world. But then I'm prejudiced.''You talk,' I said, 'as if you were ninety-nine.''For a woman I very nearly am,' she said. 'I'm thirty five.”
“It was then that Maxim looked at me. He looked at me for the first time that evening. And in his eyes I read the message of farewell. It was as though he leant against the side of a ship, and I stood below him on the quay. There would be other people touching his shoulder, and touching mine, but we would not see them. Nor would we speak or call to one another, for the wind and the distance would carry away the sound of our voices. But I should see his eyes and he would see mine before the ship drew away from the side of the quay.”
“Those dripping crumpets, I can see them now. Tiny crisp wedges of toast, and piping-hot, flaky scones. Sandwiches of unknown nature, mysteriously flavoured and quite delectable, and that very special gingerbread. Angel cake, that melted in the mouth, and his rather stodgier companion, bursting with peel and raisins. There was enough food there to keep a starving family for a week.”