Dame Daphne du Maurier, Lady Browning (1907- 1989) was born on May 13, 1907, in London, England. She was the middle child of three daughters born to actress Muriel Beaumont and her actor/manager husband Sir Gerald du Maurier.
Daphne’s paternal grandfather George du Maurier was a writer and cartoonist. He created the character of Svengali in the 1894 novel, Trilby.
Several members of the du Maurier and Beaumont families were writers and/or actors, so she was raised in a creative environment. She was a first cousin of the Llewellyn Davies boys who were the inspiration for J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan.
Her father wanted a son. Daphne became a tomboy to try to gain the attention he would have given to a son. She would later speculate that her “two lives” gave her a definite creative advantage and she felt her creativity came from her masculine side. Her feminine side of loving wife and mother which she shared with the world ruled the rest of her life.
Daphne was sometimes shy and reclusive, especially when she was writing.
At a time when getting published was especially difficult for women, Daphne was able to use family contacts in the publishing industry to help jumpstart her literary career. She published her first novel, The Loving Spirit, in 1931.
In 1932, she married Major Frederick Browning. They had three children, and Browning was eventually promoted to the rank of Lieutenant-General. After he was knighted in 1946, she became Lady Browning. Du Maurier always wrote using her maiden name. After she was made Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1969, she never used her title.
Published in 1938, Rebecca was her most successful novel. Between 1938 and 1965, it sold over three million copies and has never been out of print.
Daphne disliked being classified as a romance novelist. Her works can be more accurately classified as belonging to mystery/thriller or paranormal genres. Alfred Hitchcock adapted three of her works for film, Rebecca, the short story “The Birds” and Jamaica Inn. Several of her other works were made into films, but Daphne only liked Hitchcock’s Rebecca and Nicholas Roeg’s 1973 adaptation of her short story “The Birds” which is titled Don’t Look Now.
Two of her works, Rebecca and “The Birds” were challenged for plagiarism, but neither author could prove their claims.
During her lifetime, she wrote three plays, several short stories, Twelve nonfiction works, and seventeen fiction novels.
Daphne du Maurier died in her sleep of heart failure at the age of 81 in her home in Cornwall. In accordance with her wishes, the family did not have a memorial service, and her ashes were scattered off the cliffs of Kilmarth and Menabilly, Cornwall.
Photo Credit:
By Unknown author - The Chichester Partnership (copyright), University of Exeter (publication), Copyrighted free use, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=9012971
Selected Works by Daphne du Maurier:
Novels:
The Loving Sirit
I’ll Never Be Young Again
The Progress of Julius
Jamaica Inn
Rebecca
Frenchman’s Creek
Hungry Hill
The King’s General
The Parasites
My Cousin Rachel
Mary Anne
The Scapegoat
Castle Dor (with Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch)
The Glass-Blowers
The Flight of the Falcon
The House on the Strand
Rule Britannia
Plays:
Rebecca
The Years Between
September Tide
Short Fiction:
Happy Christmas
Collected Short Fiction:
The Apple Tree (entitled Kiss Me Again, Stranger in the U.S.)
Early Stories
The Breaking Point (AKA The Blue Lenses)
Not After Midnight
The Rendezvous and Other Stories
Classics of the Macabre
Don’t Look Now (new anthology of her works published after her death)
The Doll: The Lost Short Stories (A Collection of du Maurier’s early short stories discovered after her death)
Non-fiction Works:
Gerald: a Portrait
The du Mauriers
“A Writer is a Strange Creature”
Come Wind, Come Weather
The Young George du Maurier
The Infernal World of Branwell Brontë
Vanishing Cornwall
Golden Lads: Sir Francis Bacon, Anthony Bacon, and Their Friends
The Winding Stair: Francis Bacon, His Rise, and Fall
Growing Pains – the Shaping of a Writer
The Rebecca Notebook and Other Memories
Enchanted Cornwall