Daphne du Maurier made the landscapes of Cornwall central to a fiction of suspense, uncertainty and the past’s persistent hold on the present. Her 1938 novel Rebecca, with its unnamed narrator and the absent first Mrs de Winter, became her best-known work; the short story “The Birds” later gave Alfred Hitchcock the basis for a film that carried her unsettling vision to a wider audience. Yet her career ranged well beyond those two titles: she wrote novels, short stories, plays and biographies, and spent much of her life in Cornwall, where many of her works are set.
A London childhood and a first novel
Du Maurier was born in London on 13 May 1907, the middle of three daughters of actor-manager Gerald du Maurier and actress Muriel Beaumont. Her grandfather George du Maurier was a writer and cartoonist, and her family included other people involved in theatre and the arts. As a child, she encountered prominent actors through her father’s work. She spent her childhood at Cannon Hall in Hampstead and summers at the family home in Fowey, Cornwall; the family also lived there during the war years.
Her literary career began with The Loving Spirit, published in 1931. Some early writing appeared in Bystander, a magazine associated with her great-uncle Comyns Beaumont. Her family connections gave her an early route into print, but the range and persistence of her work soon became defining features of her career. Alongside novels, she produced short fiction, plays and non-fiction, including biographical writing about her father and the du Maurier family.
She married Frederick “Boy” Browning in 1932. They had three children. Browning was later knighted, after which du Maurier was also known as Lady Browning, although she continued to publish under her own name. Her husband died in 1965. Du Maurier spent much of her life in Cornwall, and the county’s places and history recur throughout her fiction. In her later years she lived at Kilmarth, near Par; the house became the setting for The House on the Strand.
Manderley and the power of what is absent
Published in 1938, Rebecca follows a young woman who becomes the second wife of Maxim de Winter and enters a household still governed by the memory of his first wife. The narrator remains unnamed, while Rebecca’s presence is felt throughout the novel. At Manderley, the estate and its household give that psychological tension a physical setting. The famous first sentence, “Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again”, establishes a story shaped by memory before the reader has encountered the house itself.
The book was an immediate success. In the United States, members of the American Booksellers Association voted it their favourite novel of 1938, and it received the National Book Award in that category. It has remained in print and was ranked fourteenth in the BBC’s 2003 survey of the nation’s best-loved novels. Its success did not narrow du Maurier’s work to one kind of story. Jamaica Inn (1936), Frenchman’s Creek (1941), My Cousin Rachel (1951), The Scapegoat (1957) and The House on the Strand (1969) each show her returning to suspense while changing its historical or psychological frame.
Du Maurier disliked being categorised simply as a romantic novelist. Her fiction often resists reassuring conclusions, letting danger and ambiguity continue beyond the apparent resolution. That effect is also apparent in her short stories. “The Birds” appeared in 1952 in the collection The Apple Tree; other dark tales include “Don’t Look Now”, “The Blue Lenses” and “The Apple Tree”. The 1963 film of “The Birds”, directed by Hitchcock, became one of the most prominent screen adaptations of her work. Its setting and characters differ from the story, but its continuing cultural profile helped make du Maurier’s suspense familiar to audiences beyond her readers.
Writing for the stage and beyond
Du Maurier adapted Rebecca for the stage. The production opened at London’s Queen’s Theatre in March 1940, with Celia Johnson and Owen Nares as the de Winters and Margaret Rutherford as Mrs Danvers. After 181 performances, it transferred to the Strand Theatre and continued for a further run. Theatre was not an occasional diversion: she wrote two more plays, The Years Between and September Tide. The Years Between, first staged in Manchester in 1944, transferred to London the following year and ran for 617 performances. September Tide opened at the Aldwych Theatre in 1948 and ran for 267 performances.
Her non-fiction also reached beyond conventional biography. The Glass-Blowers drew on her French Huguenot ancestry and the French Revolution, while Vanishing Cornwall presented the county through text and photographs by her son Christian. In The House on the Strand, she combined a love affair set in fourteenth-century Cornwall with a modern story involving apparent mental time travel and the dangers of mind-altering drugs. Her final novel, Rule Britannia, appeared in 1972. Her books continued to be adapted for film and television, including Jamaica Inn, Rebecca, My Cousin Rachel and “Don’t Look Now”.
A Cornish life and a lasting readership
Du Maurier’s association with Cornwall was more than a matter of setting. She lived in the county for much of her life, and local places recur across her writing. After Browning’s death, she moved to Kilmarth near Par and became an early member of Mebyon Kernow, a Cornish nationalist party. The landscape that readers meet in her fiction is therefore connected to a sustained life in the region, as well as to the distinctive atmosphere she created on the page.
She was appointed Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1969. Du Maurier died at her home in Par on 19 April 1989, aged 81. At her request, there was no memorial service; her ashes were scattered from the cliffs around Kilmarth and Menabilly. Her writing continued to find new readers through reprints, adaptations and collections. The discovery and publication of early stories in The Doll: The Lost Short Stories in 2011 also showed that her development as a writer could be traced beyond the works published during her lifetime.
Why Daphne du Maurier deserves a place in British Legacy
Daphne du Maurier belongs in British Legacy for the way she made place and psychological suspense work together. Cornwall is not merely a picturesque backdrop in her fiction: it is part of the imaginative structure of books such as Jamaica Inn, The King’s General and The House on the Strand. Her long life in the county, her use of its history and landscapes, and her early involvement in a Cornish political movement give that literary connection a concrete context. Her work also demonstrates the breadth of a career that cannot be reduced to a single genre: she wrote popular novels, short stories, stage plays and non-fiction, moving between historical settings, domestic unease and the uncanny.
Rebecca and “The Birds” have helped carry her work across generations and across the boundaries between literature, theatre, film and television. The adaptations do not simply repeat the books: they show how her stories could prompt new creative interpretations while retaining their power to unsettle. Her enduring readership is a British cultural legacy with an international reach, but its roots are recognisably specific: a writer formed by a family connected to the arts, whose life and fiction remained closely attached to Cornwall. Remembering du Maurier means recognising both the continuing force of her best-known stories and the varied body of work that made them possible.
Sources
Adapted in part from Daphne du Maurier by Wikipedia contributors, under CC BY-SA 4.0. Text has been edited and combined with the existing article; this adapted text is shared under the same licence. Contributor history.