British novelist Daphne du Maurier, best known for the novels My
Cousin Rachel, Rebecca and Jamaica Inn and the short
stories The Birds and Don't Look Now, was born on this date in 1907.
- She wasn't the only famous person or writer in her family. Her grandfather, George du Maurier, was a writer and illustrator. He wrote the novel Trilby - trilby hats are named after the title character, and the word Svengali, for a person who has a mesmeric power over another, comes from another character in the same book. He also drew cartoons for Punch, his most famous being ‘True Humility’, from which we get the expression "curate's Egg" for something which is good in parts - which is what a curate says in the cartoon when too polite to tell his host the vicar that he's served him up a rotten egg. Her parents were both actors. She had two sisters, Angela, also a writer, and Jeanne, a painter. Her cousins were the inspiration for the characters in JM Barrie's Peter Pan.
- Daphne was a tomboy as a child. She cut her hair short and dressed like a boy, even giving herself a boy's name - Eric Avon. According to Daphne's memoirs, her father had hoped she'd be a boy, and she often wished she'd been born male. In later life, she revealed to a few people that she felt like two different people; her masculine and feminine sides. The feminine side was her public face as a wife and mother but her masculine side drove her creative life and her writing. There were suggestions that she was bisexual and had had affairs with women, something both she and her children have always denied.
- Her first novel, The Loving Spirit, was published in 1931. Her last, Rule Britannia, was published in 1972. That one is about Britain leaving the Common Market and is said by some to have predicted Brexit.
- It was thanks to her first novel that she met her husband. He loved the book so much that he decided to visit Fowey, where the novel was set, and try and meet her. He did, and they were married at Lanteglos Church in 1932. His name was Frederick Browning.
- Many of Daphne du Mauriers's books have been made into films, many by Alfred Hitchcock. Daphne often disliked the film adaptations of her work and disagreed with the casting of the principal characters. She felt Olivia de Havilland was wrongly cast as the anti-heroine of My Cousin Rachel, for example, and didn't like the fact that the ending of Jamaica Inn was re-written because the star of the film, Charles Laughton, didn't like it. The only film adaptations she liked were Alfred Hitchcock's Rebecca and Nicolas Roeg's Don't Look Now.
- She wrote plays, too. She wrote three: a stage adaptation of Rebecca; The Years Between, about an officer believed killed in action in the war who comes home to find his wife is an MP and in a relationship with someone else; and the best known, September Tide, about a middle-aged woman whose son-in-law falls in love with her.
- She disliked being classified as a "romantic novelist". Her novels didn't usually have happy endings as romantic novels should, and could be quite sinister and dark.
- She was made a Dame in 1969, and while she accepted the honour, rarely used it. In fact, her children only found out about it through reading it in the papers. She was intending not to go to her investiture, either, but was persuaded it would be a great experience for her grandchildren.
- Fans of her work include novelist Sarah Walters, singer Enya and Stephen King.
- Daphne du Maurier was one of five "Women of Achievement" selected for a set of British stamps issued in August 1996. Rebecca has never been out of print, and was listed at number 14 of the "nation's best loved novel" on the BBC's 2003 survey The Big Read.
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