Daphne du Maurier was born on 13

A short account of Daphne du Maurier’s life and works 1907-1989

Daphne as a young woman at about the time she wrote The Loving Spirit

Daphne du Maurier was born on 13^th May 1907 at 24 Cumberland Terrace, Regents Park, London. Her father Gerald du Maurier, though largely forgotten now, was in his day a famous actor-manager, who was treated as something of a matinee idol by his adoring audiences. Daphne’s mother Muriel Beaumont was an actress, and she and Gerald had met and married while both were acting in the play The Admirable Crichton, written by J. M. Barrie, himself a hugely successful writer and playwright and a close friend to several members of the du Maurier family.

Daphne was the middle one of three sisters, her older sister Angela also became a writer, and her younger sister Jeanne was to become an artist. The three girls grew up in the very beautiful Cannon Hall in Hampstead and enjoyed an idyllic life full of visits to the theatre, to restaurants and on holidays, while home life was a round of parties and huge luncheon gatherings at weekends with the theatrical celebrities of that era constantly within their sphere. This life suited the outgoing and confident Angela, and young Jeanne could rely on her Mother to be on hand should she become overwhelmed by all this society. But Daphne was a more solitary girl and found all the constant
entertaining too much. She was very much her Father’s favourite daughter, and she spent her childhood behaving as her Father would want but privately dreaming of other things.
The three sisters had a somewhat sporadic education with a variety of schools and governesses. But the greatest influence on Daphne was Maud Waddell, always known a Tod, who encouraged the
breadth of Daphne’s reading, really listened to her, understood her and became a lifelong friend, even coming to Daphne’s aid many years later when she needed a governess for her own three children at Menabilly.
When she was eighteen, Daphne went to a small finishing school at the Villa Camposenea, in Meudon, just outside Paris. Here she quickly found that the way to a more comfortable life was to be part of the ‘elite’ first class. This group was taught by Yvon Fernande, ate meals at the table with the Head Mistress and senior staff and enjoyed the seclusion of spending evenings in the
‘backroom’, a space reserved for the chosen few to spend time with Mlle Yvon. Much has been written about the relationship which developed between Daphne and Mlle Yvon but suffice to say that Daphne loved Yvon deeply for a while and spent time with her on holidays in Paris, and other

parts of Northern France, where Daphne began to write some of her earliest poetry and short stories.
During Daphne’s late teens and very early twenties, she was enthusiastic about her writing but often distracted by offers of holidays abroad or family commitments. She loved the fact that her grandfather, the illustrator and novelist, George du Maurier was half French and, although he had died before she was born, she enjoyed hearing her father talking about him and other members of her French ancestry. It is entirely possible that with such a strong family link and the relationship with Yvon Fernande she could have made her second home in France and that her writing could have taken a very different direction under those influences. However, the turning point came when her mother decided to take the three girls on an excursion to Cornwall in search of a holiday home.
After a false start in Looe, the du Maurier party drove on to Bodinnick to cross the river on the car ferry to Fowey. They stopped at the Old Ferry Inn at Bodinnick for lunch and discovered that a former shipyard, called Swiss Cottage, was up for sale just across the road. Muriel could see the potential of this property, and it’s beautiful location, just by the ferry slip, nestled beside the River Fowey, and the girls were all enchanted by the possibilities of holidaying in such a property. Muriel
had an eye for creating an attractive home and soon Swiss Cottage had been renamed Ferryside and transformed into a holiday home for family and friends. When Gerald holidayed at Ferryside plenty of other guests, often from the world of theatre, were invited to help to keep him entertained, but
to Daphne’s joy, when the holidays were over, she was often allowed to stay on at Ferryside by herself to pursue her writing. Sometimes she stayed in the house, but often she stayed just across the road with Miss Roberts, a local woman, and let herself into Ferryside each day to sit at her desk and write, in her bedroom overlooking the river.
Her early writing often included poetry, possibly as a way of getting ideas down on paper and she continued to write short stories. At about this time her Mother’s brother Comyns Beaumont, known as Uncle Willie, who edited The Bystander magazine, agreed to publish a number of her short stories, poems and essays, which gave her a feel of what it could be like to earn a living, and a level of independence, as a writer. She was often called back home to Hampstead to join in family commitments, and she continued to visit Yvon Fernande in France but would escape back to Fowey whenever she could.
Daphne got to know many people in the surrounding area and on the river, and always waved to the crew of the clay ships as they passed Ferryside on the way to and from the docks. The great literary man of Fowey and friend of J.M. Barrie was Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, also known as Q. He lived with his wife Louisa and their daughter Foy at a house called The Haven on the Esplanade in Fowey. Soon Daphne was visiting them regularly for Sunday supper and enjoyed hearing stories about the local area and talking about literature and writing with Q. Daphne and Foy became close friends, a friendship which lasted for their lifetimes.
During her early days in Fowey Daphne learned about a mansion called Menabilly, owned by the Rashleigh family since Tudor times but now empty because the current owner did not wish to live there and had allowed the house to fall into disrepair. The house, around the headland from Fowey, but hidden in woodland laid back behind Polridmouth beach, was indeed sad and neglected, as Daphne discovered when she trespassed on the land in an attempt to find the house. She loved it on sight and vowed that one day she would live at Menabilly.
One of the people who talked to Daphne and told her lots of interesting facts about the area was Harry Adams, who taught her how to sail and to fish. He was married to a member of the Slade family, who owned the shipyard in the village of Polruan, just downriver. Daphne had found the hulk
of an old ship called the Jane Slade laid up in Pont Creek with her figurehead still intact. Harry told Daphne the story of the Slade family and in particular about Jane who was a remarkable woman having owned and run the shipyard, following her husband’s death, and at the same time ran one of the inns in Polruan. He showed Daphne family letters and papers, and as he did so, the glimmer of a novel began to brew in Daphne’s mind.
The novel she wrote was The Loving Spirit (1931), a family saga crossing four generations, based on the Slade family and the shipyard, with the family in the novel becoming the Coombes. Daphne wrote quickly and then had to edit her work down to a more realistic length, but she was successful in getting William Heineman to published her, and her first novel sold well.
Daphne’s second novel was I’ll Never Be Young Again (1932). She began it once The Loving Spirit had been accepted for publication, but before it had gone into print. She wrote this during a time when she was happy to be back at the family home in Hampstead because she had started a relationship with the actor, and later film director, Carol Reed. This relationship seems to have been her first serious one with a man, and they enjoyed each other’s company spending as much time together as possible. This relationship concerned Daphne’s father, but it seems that he was suffering from jealousy because his dearest daughter was distracted by a handsome young man and had less time to spend with him. Daphne travelled into London every day to work on her book in a
room that, her father’s secretary and mother’s sister, Aunt Billie loaned her, in Gerald’s offices in
Orange Street, off Leicester Square. Daphne wrote quickly and completed the book in two months.