Daphne's unruly passions (original) (raw)

'Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again', the opening of Rebecca, is Daphne du Maurier's most quoted line. And from 10 May, the centenary of her birth, we should all be prepared to revisit Manderley repeatedly, as in a recurring dream. For du Maurier is about to be comprehensively celebrated.

The BBC plans a double helping: a new drama, Daphne, by Amy Jenkins and a documentary by Rick Stein, The Road to Manderley. In Fowey, Cornwall, where she spent most of her writing life, there will be a Daphne du Maurier festival between 10 and 19 May that will include talks, concerts and guided walks. There will also be a literary conference in which her son, Kits Browning, will take part. Justine Picardie has chosen this moment to reconstitute du Maurier in fiction, as a detective in her thriller Daphne, and Virago is about to publish The Daphne du Maurier Companion

Why is it that du Maurier still has such a hold? Why do so many women writers (with the exception of PD James, who voted Rebecca as 'worst' novel) want to write about her? After spending the past weeks submerged in the novels, I can volunteer one thing, and it is not an answer, more the beginning of a question. Du Maurier was mistress of calculated irresolution. She did not want to put her readers' minds at rest. She wanted her riddles to persist. She wanted the novels to continue to haunt us beyond their endings. And several of them do.

According to her biographer, Margaret Forster, du Maurier used to make lists of what she hoped to achieve. 'Number one was atmosphere. That was her secret - she was a creator of atmosphere.' But to define that atmosphere is less straightforward. Forster writes especially well about the way in which one house dominated du Maurier's life - as it does Rebecca (1938). Manderley is as powerful as any character du Maurier created. The house is a love object, yet there is reason to hate it. It is fused with Rebecca, its most complicated ghost. Mrs Danvers, the housekeeper, with deviant devotion, keeps Rebecca's personal effects enshrined in its West Wing. Like the narrative itself, Manderley is all twisted paths with no straight avenue in sight. And by the end, we have been twisted too into a queasy collusion with the murderous Maxim de Winter.

Manderley was partly inspired by a real house in Cornwall, Menabilly. Du Maurier fell in love with it and wrote about it before she ever lived there (uninhabited, its windows blinded by ivy, she saw it as 'asleep', waiting for her). A photograph shows Menabilly as unexpectedly plain, with an unreadable facade. Like Manderley, it was hidden in woods and could not be seen from the shore. Pleasingly, du Maurier was able to rent it partly through the proceeds of Rebecca: Manderley paid for Menabilly. Du Maurier never owned the house. It was like an illicit affair - hers, yet not hers. She once said, 'Houses are not like marriages ... one cannot just walk out and leave them.' According to Margaret Forster, Menabilly was 'secretive - and Daphne loved secrets'.

There was one secret that was only made public in 1994, with the publication of Forster's biography. It revealed that although du Maurier was married (and never walked out on her husband) she was bisexual, with a strong lesbian side. A famous early photograph shows a girl with bobbed hair and a string of pearls. The expression on her face is aloof, clear, undeceived. An unflappable flapper. She was the granddaughter of novelist George du Maurier and daughter of actor-manager Gerald du Maurier (who wished, in a poem, that Daphne had been born a boy). Her father's relationship with her was claustrophobically adoring (he once said he wished he could be reborn as her son). But he claimed to be thrilled when she got engaged, in 1932, to Tommy Browning, a Grenadier Guards officer. 'Pleased?' said Gerald. 'My dears, I am delighted - I thought she would have had a baby by a Cornish fisherman by now!' In the du Maurier household, according to Margaret Forster, 'everyone acted all the time'. There were jokes galore and a private language. 'Venetian' was family slang for lesbian.

Du Maurier's most profound 'Venetian' passion was for Ellen Doubleday, the wife of her American publisher. She once said she wished she could be Ellen's child - a strange companion piece to her father's fantasy about wishing he could be her son. The two women became great friends but Ellen, even when holidaying with Daphne in Italy, would not do as the Venetians did. It was with the actress Gertrude Lawrence that Daphne had her most passionate lesbian affair. Gertrude became a substitute for Ellen. She was acting in du Maurier's play September Tide, playing Stella, a character based on Ellen. It must have been a headily seductive situation.

Ellen was also, according to du Maurier, the inspiration for My Cousin Rachel (1951). This seems, re-reading the novel, the coldest of compliments. Rachel has big eyes, small hands, killing charm. She is as unknowable as Rebecca, a riddle with a countenance that is sometimes 'small and narrow, a face upon a coin'. (Rachel is also that rare thing: a dangerous gardener.)

I asked Sarah Waters, who is not only an admirer of du Maurier but could be seen as her natural successor, what she thought of the portrait of Ellen. She suggested that du Maurier used her novels to work through 'unruly feelings' about women. It is true that it is to women that she most appeals as a writer. Reading du Maurier, Waters says, 'something chimes inside you'. She sees Rebecca as akin to Jane Eyre (and as an influence on Angela Carter in The Bloody Chamber). 'There is a lot of Bluebeard in Rebecca ... You can't believe there was ever a point where the novel didn't exist.'

When Daphne du Maurier died, most of the obituaries tended to focus on Rebecca - it has a way of obstructing the view. But for thriller writer Sarah Dunant, Jamaica Inn (1936) is equally deserving of notice. It is a rattling, magnificent, slightly leaky wagon of a novel, with the Cornish moors as its bleak backdrop. The rough weather seems to conspire with the violent landlord of Jamaica Inn. Mary Yellen, its heroine, has tremendous pluck. She gives in to only one thing (and with her eyes open): love. 'Jamaica Inn is a portrait of fear, shame, collusion,' Dunant declares. Du Maurier was especially good at describing the 'terrible collision of attraction and suspicion between men and women'. She believes du Maurier 'stretched the form' as a thriller writer and places her 'on a par with Wilkie Collins'. But she stresses the 'darkness' in her work: 'Even the happy endings are never happy. They are tainted.' And the queasiness? 'It is the price paid for charisma in men.'

Dunant also points out that the atmosphere in du Maurier depends on her feeling for landscape. (Her bestselling non-fictional book, Vanishing Cornwall, is about to be republished by Virago.) 'She is very good on English landscape. You may think of her as an urbane socialite coming out of Edwardian England, but she went to the land.' Du Maurier knew every inch of the Cornish countryside she described in the way that only a dedicated walker could.

She was a romantic, and that included a Wordsworthian need to be alone. Dunant thinks the loneliness is at the heart of her books and their heroines. She could be vivid company but often preferred to withdraw from society, perhaps finding it too much of a performance. The performance that really counted happened on the page. She was a dutiful wife, although the maternal instinct did not come easily (she was distant at first to her two daughters; to her son, she was always more closely attached).

There is, in several of her novels, an exploration of what it might mean to escape altogether. The House on the Strand (1969) is about drug-induced escape into the 14th century. The plot doesn't creak exactly, but it swoons. The Scapegoat (1957) is a similarly skilful but contrived exploration of a double life. I prefer the earlier Frenchman's Creek (1941), a dashing, slender novel about sex and responsibility. Dona is a fugitive from the Restoration court, a mother who abandons her children and escapes down to the creek into the arms of a French pirate with a taste for philosophy and soup. Will she leave her kind, irritating husband and children for him? Well, no. But du Maurier leaves us in no doubt. The unexamined life is worth living, even if the dream must not be encouraged to last. And Frenchman's Creek has a bravura ending. Where a more ordinary writer might have described the pirate vanishing at sundown - to emphasise a passion properly relinquished - du Maurier has the rising sun, red and bold, as her finishing line.

Essential Du Maurier

Jamaica Inn (1936)

Rebecca (1938)

Frenchman's Creek (1941)

My Cousin Rachel (1951)

The House on the Strand (1969)

Don't Look Now and Other Stories (1971)

They say: 'She satisfied all the questionable criteria of popular fiction and yet satisfied too the exacting requirements of "real literature", something very few novelists ever do.' - Margaret Forster