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Daphne du Maurier (1907-1989) - married name Lady Daphne Browning | |
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English novelist, biographer, and playwright, who published romantic suspense novels, mostly set on the coast of Cornwall. Du Maurier is best known for REBECCA (1938), filmed by Alfred Hitchcock in 1940. Orson Welles's radio adaptation from 1938 also paved way for its success. The novel has been characterized as the last and most famous imitations of Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre (1847). "Adventure was here. Adventure was there. Adventure was in picking up a posy dropped by a lady and offering it to an old gentleman who patted her head and gave her two-pence. Adventure was in gazing into pawnbrokers' windows, in riding in wagons when the carter smiled, in scuffling with apprentice boys, in hovering outside the bookshops, and when the bookseller was inside, tearing out the middle pages to read at home, for prospective purchasers never looked at anything but the beginning and the end." (from Mary Anne, 1954) Daphne du Maurier was born in London into an artistic family. She was the granddaughter of caricaturist George du Maurier, her mother, Muriel Beaumont, was an actress, and her father was the actor-manager Sir Gerald du Maurier, who turned to writing and created the mad hypnotist Svengali. One of her ancestors was Mary Anne Clarke, the mistress of the duke of York, second son of King George III. She later became the heroine of du Maurier's novel MARY ANNE (1954). In 1831 Mary Anne Clarke's daughter married Louis-Mathurin Busson du Maurier. Her father Du Maurier portrayed in GERALD (1934). THE GLASS-BLOWERS (1963) was a novel about the Busson family. Du Maurier grew up in a lively London household, where friends like J.M. Barrie and Edgar Wallace visited frequently. Her uncle, a magazine editor, published one of her stories when she was only a teenager and got her a literary agent. Du Maurier attended schools in London, Meudon, France, and Paris. In her childhood she was a voracious reader, she was fascinated by imaginary worlds and developed a male alter ego for herself. Du Maurier also had a male narrator in several novels. Her first book, THE LOVING SPIRIT, appeared in 1931. It was followed by JAMAICA INN (1936), a historical tale of smugglers, which was bought for the movies, and directed by Alfred Hitchcock, who later used her short story, 'The Birds', a tense tale of nature turning on humanity, for another film production. Also Du Maurier's FRENCHMAN'S CREEK, a pirate romance, and MY COUSIN RACHEL (1951), were succesfully filmed. The latter examined how a man may be manipulated by a woman, who perhaps has murdered her husband. Ambrose Ashley meets the beautiful Rachel Sangaletti, marries her and died six months later. He has sent letters to his nephew Philip, the narrator, who first hates Rachel, and then is bewitched by her. Du Maurier leaves open the question, is Rachel a posoner, or an innocent victim of Ambrose's and then Philip's paranoid fantasies. The author herself was as puzzled as her readers, did Rachel kill Ambrose. "Sometimes I think she did, sometimes I didn't - in the end I just couldn't make up my mind," du Maurier said. Rachel dies, taking the secret with her, but Philip's role in her death is clear, and perhaps he is the real murderer of the story. In 1932 du Maurier married to Lieutenant Colonel Frederick Arthur Montague Browning II, who was knighted for his distinguished service during World War II. They were happily married for thirty-three years and had three children; Browning died in 1965. Du Maurier was made dame in 1969 for her literary distinction. She died on April 19, 1989. Her pictorial memoir, ENCHANTED CORNWALL, appeared posthumously in 1992. With her son, Christian, she published VANISHING CORNWALL in 1967. Like Rebecca, many of her novels and short stories were set in Cornwall, England's westernmost county, whose wild, stormy weather and wild past inspired her imagination. "Here was the freedom I desired, long sought-for, not yet known," she wrote in Vanishing Cornwall. "Freedom to write, to walk, to wander, freedom to climb hills, to pull a boat, to be alone." Du Maurier's home was at a seventeenth-century mansion, Menabilly, overlooking the sea, for a quarter of a century. The house became the scene of her historical novel THE KING'S GENERAL (1946). Rebecca's opening line, "Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again," is among the most memorable in twentieth-century literature. The story centers on a young and timid heroine. Her life is made miserable by her strangely behaving husband, Maxim de Winter, whom she just have married. Maxim is a wealthy widower, whose wife Rebecca has died in mysterious circumstances. His house is ruled by Mrs. Danvers, the housekeeper, who has made Rebecca's room a shrine. Du Maurier focuses on the fears and fantasies of the new wife, who eventually learns, that her husband did not love his former wife, a cruel, egoistical woman. Because of the familiar plot, suits of plagiarism were brought against du Maurier, but they were dropped when the widespread use of the theme, beginning from Charlotte Brontë's works, was established. Du Maurier's book, on the other hand, inspired Maureen Freely's novel The Other Rebecca (1996), in which the enigmatic Maxim de Winter appears as Max Midwinter. Du Maurier started to write Rebecca while traveling in Egypt. She poured all of her own emotions in the central characted after learning about her husband's earlier live and his great love, Jan Ricardo, who had been an exotic, dark beauty. Before Alfred Hitchcock's film version, Orson Welles made a radio dramatization of Rebecca. It was performed in December 1938 by The Campbell Playhouse and sponsored by Campbell Soup. The adaptation starts with Bernard Herrmann's waltz-ladden score, but is then interrupted by an "important message from a man who keeps one eye on the dining table and another on the pantry..." Welles played Maxim de Winter and Margaret Sullavan the second Mrs de Winter. The producer David O. Selznick sent a transcript of the broadcast to Hitchcock. "If we do in motion pictures as fauthful a job as Welles did on the radio," Selznick wrote, "we are likely to have the same success the book had and the same success that Welles had." Besides popular novels Du Maurier published short stories, plays, and biographies, among others Branwell Brontë's, the brother of sisters Anne, Charlotte, and Emily. Her biography of Francis Bacon, an English statesman in the 1500s and 1600s, appeared in 1976. Du Maurier's autobiography, GROWING PAINS, was published when she was 70. In the late 1950s, du Maurier began to take interest in the supernatural. During this period she wrote several stories, which explored fears and paranoid fantasies, among them 'The Pool', in which a young girl glimpses a magical world in the woods, but is later barred from it, and 'The Blue Lenses', in which a woman sees everyone around her having the head of an animal. In 1970 appeared her second collection of short stories, NOT AFTER MIDNIGHT, which included 'Don't Look Now', a tale set in Venice, involving a psychic old lady, a man with the sixth sense, and a murderous dwarf. A film version of the story, directed by Nicholas Roeg, was made in 1973. Du Maurier received in 1977 the Grand Master Award from the Mystery Writers of America. For further reading: Daphne Du Maurier by Richard Kelly ( 1987); Daphne: The Life of Daphne du Maurier by Judith Cook (1991); The Private World of Daphne du Maurier by Martyn Shallcross (1992); Daphne du Maurier by Margaret Forster (1993); Daphne Du Maurier: A Daughter's Memoir by Flavia Leng (1995); Daphne Du Maurier: Writing, Identity and the Gothic Imagination by Avril Horner, Sue Zlosnik (1998); Mystery and Suspense Writers, vol. 1, ed. by Robin W. Winks (1998); Daphne Du Maurier, Haunted Heiress by Nina Auerbach (1999) - George Du Maurier (1834-96). Artist and illustrator, born in Paris. Joined the staff of Punch, and gained fame as a satirist. Wrote and illustrated three novels. He produced his first novel, Peter Ibbetson (1891), at the age of fifty-six, and then wrote Trilby (1894), which brought the name of a character, Svengali, to common use. - Note: Du Maurier's and actress Gertrude Lawrence's love letters were published in Daphne Du Maurier: The Secret Life of the Renowned Storyteller by Margaret Forster (1993) - Other film adaptations: Hungry Hill, dir. by Brian Desmond Hurst, 1946; The Birds, dir. by Alfred Hitchcock, script Evan Hunter, 1963; Don't Look Now, dir. by Nicholas Roeg, 1973. "Birds was slaughtered by Stanley Kauffman in the New Republic (April 13, 1963): "The script by Evan Hunter... is absolutely bereft of even the slick-magazine sophistication that Hitchcock's films usually have. The dialogue is stupid, the characters insufficiently developed to rank as cliches, the story incohesive... Suzanne Pleshette as a local schoolteacher is unobjectionable. The rest of the cast are offensively bad." - Suomeksi kirjailijalta on myös suomennettu kokoelma Linnut ja muita kertomuksia. Selected works:
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