Western Morning News (11/May/2007) - Daphne revival inspires women writers
(c) Western Morning News
- keywords: Alfred Hitchcock, Daphne du Maurier, Gertrude Lawrence, Jamaica Inn (1939), Rebecca (1940)
She couldn't spell, her dialogue could be stilted, and some of her more ambitious concepts didn't work. But with her gift for conveying the atmosphere of Cornwall through rip-roaring yarns, Daphne du Maurier was unparalleled.
Her books are back in fashion and a new generation is blowing the dust off the hardback first editions and battered 1970s Pan paperbacks, or buying new Virago editions, with new introductions by "serious" women writers. We all, it seems, want to go to Manderley again, with the heroine of her most haunting novel, Rebecca.
The writers and academics gathering in the picturesque village of Fowey today and yesterday for a conference as part of the Daphne Du Maurier Festival, this year marking the 100th anniversary of her birth, are evidence of a Daphne revival.
This may be a literary conference, but it is surely more of a chance to soak up the place which du Maurier made her own and which is infused through all her most spellbinding stories. For while her novels are now considered worthy of literary scrutiny, the real nub of her appeal remains her pull on the imagination, both through the novels and the enigma of her own life.
Many writers are inspired to use both Daphne's work and her life as a springboard for their own work.
Sally Beauman, one of the speakers at the conference, is the latest writer to produce a creative work shedding light on the shadowy Rebecca, the first wife who gives the narrator such torment in the novel of that name.
Meanwhile novelist and journalist Justine Picardie, who is giving a talk during the festival, has taken a difficult period of the novelist's own life as the starting point for her novel Daphne, to be published next year.
"I think for women she is particularly important," says conference organiser Helen Taylor. "I think she is a very special writer to women; lots of women's faces light up when you mention Daphne du Maurier. They say, 'Oh, my mother used to read her novels'!"
Helen, Professor of English at the University of Exeter and editor of the Daphne du Maurier Companion, published this month, will be in conversation with American academic Nina Auerbach - author of the biography Daphne du Maurier, Haunted Heiress - in the du Maurier Theatre tomorrow afternoon at the festival, and also with Daphne's three children about their mother at an event in the same venue during the afternoon.
"I got very interested in Daphne du Maurier in the 1980s," says Helen. "A lot of feminist critics got very interested in romance because what we suddenly realised was how important romance is to women writers and that included ourselves."
She became intrigued by the fact that Daphne's novels were a great deal more anarchic and challenging than they first appeared, if you looked beyond the sometimes sentimental prose.
The Loving Spirit is not just a family saga, it is the story of a woman bonded with her son through a shared love of the sea, a relationship which hints at incest. Jamaica Inn is about the struggle of a friendless woman to escape the brutality of a madman. And then there is Rebecca, the gothic horror story set around a house based on Daphne's beloved Menabilly, the stately home she rented near Fowey, which Alfred Hitchcock turned into a romance with a happy ending.
"Rebecca takes on a lot of the themes of romance," says Helen. "It is set in a big house with a handsome hero with a mysterious past and a Jane Eyre figure who, like all of us, thinks she is plain and uninteresting and dull and will never find her prince. She finds her prince but of course that isn't what the novel's about. This isn't a romantic novel, it is a novel about a woman who marries a murderer.
"I became fascinated by it because I think it is a very complex novel and Daphne du Maurier experiments with lots of different genres, with the gothic, with the romance, with the science fiction."
The conference takes place in Fowey, which Daphne discovered as a young woman and lived and wrote most of her life. "Place was important to her," says Helen. "She grew up in bohemian theatrical London. It was a very comfortable bohemian society, but she chooses to live in this bloody great mansion which she rents in the middle of dripping woods in Cornwall. That tells you a lot.
"She has written wonderfully about the Westcountry and Cornwall. So many of us fell in love with Cornwall without having every been there through her novels, because she has the most wonderful way of putting people into landscapes.
"One contributor (to the Daphne du Maurier Companion) says you can smell the hedgerows in the novel, and what that woman meant is that you really feel the landscape.
"Daphne du Maurier has looked at the landscape in all weathers, she enjoys the landscape after rain. She has walked her dogs in the Cornish landscape - she was a big walker - and she absorbed the landscape."
The sense of danger in Daphne's novels was mirrored in her own life. Daphne was bisexual, and although she stayed married to her army officer husband Tommy "Boy" Browning, in middle age she fell head over heels in love with the wife of her American publisher, Ellen Doubleday.
She was distraught that Ellen did not return her feelings, and instead fell into the arms of American actress Gertrude Lawrence, who played the lead in Daphne's play September Song, a character inspired by Ellen.
Helen thinks that Daphne's bisexuality influenced her writing as much as her love of lonely places and her discomposure in polite society.
"She was sort of drawn to danger," says Helen. "She lived on the margins. She writes quite a lot of novels with male narrators and that is quite unusual with a popular novel.
"Her own troubled sexuality meant she had a very interesting insight into men and women who had problems with their own identity. She had an insight into what made people outsiders."
