A Tribute to Daphne du Maurier
by J. G. Harlond
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| Dame Daphne du Maurier, Lady Browning, DBE 13 May 1907 – 19 April 1989 |
It is 80
years now since Daphne du Maurier’s novel Rebecca was first released. Back in
1938, du Maurier’s publishers were nervous about the novel’s future, but the story has become a
classic: a world-wide favourite, a play, a television series, even an iconic
black and white movie. For a while, back in the '90s, new editions of du
Maurier’s novels were hard to obtain, but with the recent film version of My Cousin Rachel she is very much back
in the public eye. Which is as it should be, because Daphne du Maurier was a
very accomplished novelist.
Despite
her success, du Maurier would probably make a modern publisher nervous, too. She
did not, or would not, stick to one genre. Worse: she wrote books that were the
antithesis of best sellers. The
Glass-blowers (a fictionalised version of her French family history) was
written in direct opposition to the hugely popular Scarlet Pimpernel and Dickens’ A
Tale of Two Cities. In this novel it is the skilled artisan not the aristocrat
who takes centre stage: the novel tells not of heroes but of ordinary people striving
to survive and make a future for their children during the French Revolution.
And this, I think, is why many new readers are being drawn to du Maurier’s
fiction. Despite Hollywood casting’s best efforts to the contrary, her
protagonists are real people. They are ordinary men and women confused by
events, over-awed by more glamorous or charismatic people around them, caught
up in situations beyond their control. They may triumph in the end, but it is
never a certain or perfect ending.
We may
not be like the timid heroine of Rebecca
or Rachel’s doubting, bewitched young man, we aren’t the frightened girl in Jamaica Inn or the bored wife in Frenchman’s Creek, but we understand their worries and
motivations. Hungry Hill includes
extra-ordinary events, but what happens is grounded in normal family life.
Reading
the Glass-blowers recently I was struck
by this, and the simple wisdom in the story. Du Maurier understands the
difficulties her characters face: like real people (like us) they may present
one facet of their personality to the world, but underneath, inside, they are much
more complex. As was Du Maurier herself.
There is also
a sense that no matter how fantastical or exciting the plot, and most stories
are page-turners, there is something very ‘lived’ in each book. Du Maurier was
classified as a Romantic Novelist, and I’m not belittling romantic fiction, far
from it, but the sum of her writing goes well beyond that genre description. In
an article on the anniversary of Rebecca
in the Guardian (23rd February, 2018) the writer Olivia Laing says:
‘What really startled
(du Maurier) was that everyone seemed to think she’d written a romantic novel.
She believed Rebecca was about jealousy, and that all the relationships
in it – including the marriage between De Winter and his shy second wife – were
dark and unsettling. (“I’m asking you to marry me, you little fool” hardly
betokened love between equals.) The idea had emerged out of her own jealousy
about the woman to whom her husband, Tommy “Boy” Browning, had briefly been
engaged. She had looked at their love letters, and the big elegant “R” with
which Jan Ricardo signed her name had made her painfully aware of her own
shortcomings as a woman and a wife.’
Many of du Maurier’s books address the past like this,
they take on our concerns and confusions related to ‘what happened when’. Her
writing examines what Laing calls the ‘oddities of time’. Regarding these
‘oddities of time’, I remember with absolute clarity reading the time-slip
novel The House on the Strand during
the course of a family Christmas day. The paperback transported me out of a modern
household into an ancient house on a tidal reach, out of the 20th
century into the 14th century. Listening to the story on the radio
some months ago, I was taken back to those three
time periods: that Christmas day and the two epochs in the novel. Some weeks
later I picked up a battered hardback of My
Cousin Rachel and remembered worrying about the laburnum seeds in our
garden. I have now re-read most of du Maurier’s novels. On each occasion,
opening the first page I have a clear vision of a place and/or moment in the
story, and how it affected me the first time I read it. I remember reading the
end of Frenchman’s Creek during the
last lesson of a rainy Friday afternoon when I was about 16 – I remember feeling
the tears on my cheeks. The teacher confiscated the book, naturally. I’ve read
that story twice since then, and each time I’ve seen something new in it; I
relate to something I hadn’t recognised before, but each time I have been taken
back to that classroom. It is a curious experience. A good historical fiction
author can take a reader back in time in the space of a paragraph, but I wonder
how many can mark their readers for life like this?
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| Frenchman's Creek attribution: Graham Loveland |
Was du Maurier aware that she had this skill, this gift
to transport readers through time and into other lives? I don’t know. Accounts
of her own life tell of a troubled woman at odds with her gender and
circumstances; a woman trapped in a troubled marriage with a man who had a
breakdown because he was having two extra-marital affairs simultaneously. She is
often linked to the house named Menabilly on the Cornish coast, where she
apparently went to escape the real world. Big houses, full of private tragedies
and secret histories feature in many of her novels. Looking at photographs of Menabilly
I wonder if that house stands as a metaphor for her fiction – as full of
conflicting emotions, versions of the past and fantasies as the house on the strand.
Such thoughts and ideas are only suggested, it is up to each reader to
interpret them of course, and as in real life we interpret them according to
our own way of thinking and personal experiences. Readers bring their own
baggage to any book.
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| Menabilly |
Not all is what it seems in du Maurier’s novels, though,
and they can’t be limited by a genre label. “Don’t look now,” we are told in
that famous story about grieving parents in Venice, but if and when you do, you
will find something disturbing, a theme that is both honest yet fantastical.
For me, du Maurier’s novels are like a haunted room full not of ghosts but of
real lives from the past – and the present.
© J.G. Harlond
Fiction
The Loving Spirit (1931)
I'll Never Be Young Again (1932)
The Progress of Julius (1933) (later re-published as Julius)
Jamaica Inn (1936)
Rebecca (1938)
Rebecca (1940) (du Maurier's stage adaptation of her novel)
Happy Christmas (1940) (short story)
Come Wind, Come Weather (1940) (short story collection)
Frenchman's Creek (1941)
Hungry Hill (1943)
The Years Between (1945) (play)
The King's General (1946)
September Tide (1948) (play)
The Parasites (1949)
My Cousin Rachel (1951)
The Apple Tree (1952) (short story collection, later published as The Birds and Other Stories, and in the USA as Kiss Me Again, Stranger)
Mary Anne (1954)
The Scapegoat (1957)
Early Stories (1959) (short story collection, stories written between 1927–1930)
The Breaking Point (1959) (short story collection, AKA The Blue Lenses)
Castle Dor (1961) (with Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch)
The Birds and Other Stories (1963) (republication of The Apple Tree)
The Glass-Blowers (1963)
The Flight of the Falcon (1965)
The House on the Strand (1969)
Not After Midnight (1971) (short story collection, AKA Don't Look Now)
Rule Britannia (1972)
The Rendezvous and Other Stories (1980) (short story collection)
Classics of the Macabre (1987) (anthology of earlier stories, illustrated by Michael Foreman, AKA Echoes from the Macabre: Selected Stories)
The Doll: The Lost Short Stories (2011) (collection of early short stories)
Non-fiction
Gerald: A Portrait (1934)
The du Mauriers (1937)
The Young George du Maurier: a selection of his letters 1860–67 (1951)
The Infernal World of Branwell Brontë (1960)
Vanishing Cornwall (includes photographs by her son Christian, 1967)
Golden Lads: Sir Francis Bacon, Anthony Bacon and their Friends (1975)
The Winding Stair: Francis Bacon, His Rise and Fall (1976)
Growing Pains – the Shaping of a Writer (a.k.a. Myself When Young – the Shaping of a Writer, 1977)
Enchanted Cornwall (1989)
about J.G. Harlond
Originally from the south west of England, J.G Harlond (Jane) studied and worked in various different countries before finally settling down with her husband, a retired Spanish naval captain, in rural Andalucía, Spain. Despite being ‘rubbish’ at history at school because she wanted to turn everything into a story, she survived the History element of her B.A. and went on to get an M.A. in Social and Political Thought. Her historical fiction, set in the 17th century and the first half of the 20th century, features many of the places Jane has visited – along with flawed rogues, wicked crimes, and the more serious issues of being an outsider. Apart from fiction, Jane also writes school text books under her married name. Her favourite reading is along the Dorothy Dunnett lines: well-researched stories with compelling plots and complex characters. Jane is currently writing about the theft and fate of the Crown Jewels during the English Civil War for the third in her Ludo da Portovenere trilogy.
J.G. Harlond is a reviewer for Discovering Diamonds
Website: www.jgharlond.com
Twitter: @JaneGHarlond
what is your favourite du Maurier novel?
Mine is Frenchman's Creek.
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