The dark side of Daphne du Maurier

The creator of Rebecca had an unhappy marriage, an affair with her headmistress — and wished she had been born a boy

What a peculiar, slightly seedy, febrile family the du Mauriers seem to have been. We may not be startled by its members’ attitude to morality if you look at the raw ingredients.

Descended from French aristocrats (although this was later discovered by Daphne, the subject of the book, to have been a background upgrade, faked by her rackety ancestor), there were artists, actors and writers in the family including J. M. Barrie; the parents were friends with the likes of Noel Coward and Gertrude Lawrence; and there was alcoholism, exacerbated by the familial ‘black ribbons’ of depression.

Still, one reels at the description of Sunday evenings in the grand Cannon hall family home in hampstead, where celebrated stage actor Gerald du Maurier would regale his three young daughters around the dining table with stories of his imaginary ‘stable’, in which the young actresses in his company became ‘fillies’ for him ‘to break in’, selected according to a league table of looks.

Meanwhile, his wife upstairs — a former actress herself, Muriel Beaumont — would bang her foot on the floor when the laughter became too raucous.

Unhealthy, one would think, to snare your children into being complicit in your infidelities and in such an outrageous way. Gerald wished all three of his girls had been born boys. In fact, everyone in this book seems to be besotted by boys, and none more so than his middle daughter, his favourite, Daphne.

She grew up revelling in his obvious partiality towards her (later finding it oppressive, almost incestuous), but was aware that this contributed to her mother’s coldness towards her, and her favouritism to the youngest daughter, Jeanne.

One begins to think angela, the oldest, got off lightly (by dint of not being good-looking enough), escaping the attentions of either parent.

as soon as Daphne could decipher the alphabet, she read voraciously, from Peter Rabbit to the Romantic poets and the novels of her paternal grandfather, artist, writer and Paris-dweller, George du Maurier. Dickens, Scott, Wilde and the Brontes followed. then her ultimate writer’s pash — Katherine Mansfield.

From a young age, Daphne felt herself to be a boy trapped in the body of a girl. Whenever she was called upon to be dashing or brave, or to seduce, she summoned her childhood male alter-ego — eric avon. It was ‘eric’ also who unleashed her creative energy.

Years after her first love affair at 18, with the headmistress of her French finishing school, Daphne — by now a married woman of 40, with three children — fell passionately for ellen Doubleday, the wife of her powerful U.S. publisher. her ardour, to her dismay, was not returned; in letters to ellen, Daphne explained that she was loved not by a woman — she had no Sapphic tendencies (or ‘Venetian’, in the lingo of the du Maurier family) — but by her other-half, eric avon. On this point, she is quite adamant: ‘By God and by Christ, if anyone should call that sort of love by the unattractive word that begins with “L”, I’d tear their guts out.’ It was when her family visited Cornwall that Daphne’s life really began. here she could be ‘eric’ every day, dressing like a sailor, in a Breton striped pullover, cap and — always her preferred attire — trousers.

the du Mauriers bought a house in Fowey, built into a cliff and previously used for boat-building. they called it Ferryside.

For her 20th birthday, Daphne’s parents allowed their daughter to spend a month in Ferryside on her own so she could write. She also learnt how to sail and fish and was eventually given her own boat as a present. She explored the craggy coastline