Du Maurier lives on in ‘Manderley Forever’
De Rosnay knows her subject well, but the character remains a mystery
French novelist Tatiana de Rosnay ( Sarah’s Key) can’t stop dreaming of Manderley. She’s a lifelong fan of Daphne du Maurier’s novels, especially 1938’s Re
becca, with its British manor stuffed with secrets.
It’s a common feeling: Though du Maurier died in 1989, she remains the standard bearer for a peculiar blend of shipwrecked relationships, eerie incidents and upper-crust intrigue, from Rebec
ca to her short story The Birds to her 1951 novel My Cousin Rachel (a big-screen reboot starring Rachel Weisz is now in theaters).
De Rosnay’s enchantment fuels Manderley Forever: A Biography
of Daphne du Maurier (St. Martin’s Press, 306 pp., of four), which is less a full-dress biography than an extended appreciation of the English writer, mostly reshuffling earlier biographies, letter collections and memoirs. De Rosnay reveals in her preface that she intended to write “as if I were filming her, camera on my shoulder.” That makes for an earnest and engaged portrait, if a somewhat blurry one.
What’s clear is that du Maurier was practically born to be an artist, the daughter of a London stage actor and granddaughter of a novelist. She pursued her own literary ambitions as a teenager at a French finishing school, where she launched an affair with the school’s headmistress. Those secret trysts, along with her cynicism about love — she sourly watched her parents’ marriage collapse — sparked much of her early fiction.
“She’s not interested in romances or happy endings,” de Rosnay writes. “She wants to grab her readers by the throat, never to leave them indifferent.” Du Mau- rier would marry, to a decorated British army major, but questioned his fidelity after stumbling over his ex’s love letters, an experience that would inspire Rebecca, her darkest, most famous book.
Though du Maurier doubted that novel’s appeal — “It’s a bit on the gloomy side,” she wrote to her editor — it became a sensation, stoked further by Alfred Hitchcock’s 1940 film adaptation. But success pigeonholed her as a neo-gothic romance novelist. “The critics will never forgive you for writing Rebecca,” a friend told her.
The judgment stung, and de Rosnay argues that du Maurier was obsessed with gaining literary esteem to match her sales. She hosted royalty and was an inveterate traveler. But she also was shadowed by a failing marriage and years of keeping others at arm’s length for the sake of her writing. “Daphne is humorous in real life,” de Rosnay writes late in the book, which comes as a bit of a shock. How so? Such issues accrue in Mander
ley Forever. De Rosnay quotes liberally from reviews of du Maurier’s books but comments little on the books themselves. Pages are pockmarked with de Rosnay’s moony sightseeing descriptions and minor details about French translations. Purple prose and mixed metaphors sneak through (“She has to get this darkness off her chest”) and de Rosnay occasionally presumes a knowledge of her subject’s inner thoughts, particularly during her final moments, that would make conventional biographers blush.
Manderley Forever reveals du Maurier as a tireless explorer of our hidden, melancholy selves. But it also leaves much of her character a mystery.