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Daphne du Maurier: The Woman Behind Rebecca

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The Brit Lit Book Club - Daphne du Maurier: The Woman Behind Rebecca

Discover the dark, complex world of Daphne du Maurier, one of the 20th century's most brilliant and misunderstood writers. Join host Vanessa Hunt as she explores the life and legacy of the author who gave us one of literature's most famous opening lines.

What You'll Learn:

  • The fascinating, complicated life of Daphne du Maurier and her secret relationships
  • Why Rebecca is one of the greatest Gothic novels ever written
  • The Female Gothic tradition from the Brontës to modern psychological thrillers
  • How Cornwall shaped du Maurier's imagination and dark storytelling
  • The real Menabilly estate that inspired the haunting Manderley
  • Du Maurier's other masterpieces: Jamaica Inn, The Birds, My Cousin Rachel, and Don't Look Now

Perfect for fans of Gothic literature, psychological thrillers, British classics, literary history, and anyone who loves atmospheric storytelling. Whether you're a longtime Rebecca devotee or discovering du Maurier for the first time, this episode reveals the radical writer behind the romance.

Ideal for: Book club members, Gothic fiction enthusiasts, fans of Gillian Flynn and Kate Morton, literary travelers, women's literature lovers, and anyone interested in Cornwall, classic British authors, psychological suspense, and the greatest female writers of the 20th century.

📚 BOOKS RECOMMENDED IN THIS EPISODE:

Essential Du Maurier:

Biography:

The Gothic Tradition:

Modern Gothic Heirs:

Cornwall:

  • The Sea's in the Kitchen by Denys Val Baker (out of print, but may be at your library or used book store)

Love this podcast? Imagine walking the Yorkshire moors where the Brontës found inspiration, visiting Jane Austen's writing desk at Chawton, and exploring Shakespeare's birthplace with fellow book lovers. We do all this and more on The Book Club Tour!

Follow along with our adventures, or join us! 

🌐 Explore our tours: thebookclubtour.com
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Hello and welcome back to the Brit Lit Book Club. I'm your host, Vanessa, and I'm so delighted you've joined me for another episode focusing on women and British literature for Women's History Month in March. Before we begin, grab yourself a cup of tea if you can. I'm sipping on a Cornish cream tea this morning, which is a beautifully fragrant black tea, blended with just a touch of something floral and wild. There's something wonderfully appropriate about a Cornish tea as we make our way down to the rugged cliffs and secret coves of Cornwall to meet one of British literature most fascinating and elusive figures. We've spent a lot of time recently in the Victorian era in Yorkshire, parsonages, and Industrial Manchester and Dickens London. Today we're moving into the 20th century, but I promise you that the atmosphere isn't getting any lighter. If anything, it's getting darker, more shadowy, and considerably more glamorous. Daphne du Maurier, you probably know her name. You almost certainly know Rebecca. That gorgeous unsettling novel that opens with one of the most famous lines in all of English literature."Last night, I dreamt I went to Manderly again." You may have seen the Hitchcock film or the recent Netflix adaptation or simply absorbed Rebecca into your cultural consciousness, the way you absorbed certain things without quite knowing when they got there. But here's what I want you to understand today. Daphne du Maurier was not the Gentile Cornish lady sitting by the sea writing cozy, romantic suspense that her reputation sometimes suggests. She was one of the most psychologically complex writers of the 20th century. A woman whose personal life was so complicated. She invented her own private vocabulary to describe it, and she wrote stories so deeply strange and unsettling that they've been haunting readers for nearly 90 years. This is a woman who was accused of plagiarism twice, who conducted passionate relationships with both men and women while insisting she wasn't"like that", who referred to her own masculine ambitious side as"the boy in the box", and who poured all of that complexity into novels and stories that polite society read as romantic thrillers without quite realizing how dark and strange they actually were. So let's pull on our coats, it's always windy in the Cornish coast, and go meet the woman behind Manderly. Daphne du Maurier was born in London in 1907 into what you might call a dynasty of artists and dreamers. Her grandfather was George du Maurier, the illustrator, a novelist who wrote Trilby, a novel, that gave the world the word Svengali. Her father was Gerard du Maruier, one of the most celebrated actor managers of the Edwardian stage. Her mother was the actress, Muriel Beaumont. She grew up surrounded by the theater people, creative people, famous people, and she found it all absolutely exhausting. This is your first clue to understanding Daphne. She spent her entire life being surrounded by gregarious, performing socially brilliant people, and she wanted nothing more than to be left alone with a book and a view of the sea. She was not temperamentally a du Maurier. She was something stranger and quieter and more interior than the family she was born into. She was educated at home primarily, and then briefly at a finishing school in Paris, which she loathed, before her father recognized that she was never going to be in conventional society, allowed her to return to England and write. She published her first novel at 21. She was prolific, disciplined, and serious about her craft in a way that the literary establishment of the time tended to underestimate because her book sold too well to be taken seriously. This is a bias that persists to this day. The defining relationship of Daphne's life wasn't with a person. It was with a house In 1926. When she was 19, Daphne discovered Menabilly, a neglected, overgrown Georgian Manor house on the Fowy estuary The house had been empty for years, its gardens run wild, its rooms shuttered and dusty. Most people would've found it sad. Daphne found it intoxicating. She broke into it. She crept through the overgrown grounds, found an unlocked window, and explored the abandoned rooms alone, and she fell completely in love, with the house, its melancholy and the way it seemed to hold its secrets very close. She didn't actually get to live at Menabilly until 1943. She spent years writing about it before she ever moved in. But that first illicit visit gave her the essential image that would become Manderly. The house that haunts Rebecca isn't just a setting, it's a psychological presence, a character in its own right, and it came directly from Daphne's, obsessive, almost transgressive love for a real place. Now let's talk about her personal life, because this is where things get genuinely interesting and considerably complicated. In 1932, Daphne married Major Frederick"Boy" Browning, a decorated war hero, handsome, charming, and by all accounts rather conventional. They had three children. To the outside world, they were a perfectly respectable military family living in Cornwall. But Daphne had always experienced what she called"the boy in the box", her private term for the masculine, ambitious, independent part of herself that wanted adventure and creative freedom and wasn't particularly interested in domesticity. She felt she had two selves, the wife and mother that the world saw and the boy inside her who wrote dark, strange stories and fell passionately in love with women. She had intense consuming relationships with several women throughout her life, including the actress, Gertrude Lawrence, and later the widow of her publisher. She never publicly identified as bisexual or lesbian. In her era and class, you simply didn't. But she was honest about it in her private letters and diaries, describing these relationships with a passion and intimacy that's unmistakable. What's fascinating is how thoroughly this divided self, the proper English wife and the restless unconventional"boy" fed her writing. The split between surface respectability and hidden darkness is at the absolute core of everything she wrote. Her most famous novel emerged from this tension and a very direct way. Before she wrote, Rebecca Daphne's husband had been briefly engaged to a woman named Jan Ricardo. The engagement ended before boy met Daphne, but Daphne became obsessively, irrationally jealous of this woman she'd never met. This beautiful, glamorous predecessor who had known her husband first, what would it feel like? She began to wonder to be the second wife, to live in the shadow of a woman you'd never met, but who was somehow everywhere. That question became Rebecca. I want to mention one more thing about her life before we'd get into the work. Daphne du Maurier was by any measure of recluse, she found social interaction draining. She hated London. She refused most interviews, and she lived as privately as someone of her fame could possibly manage. She called her episodes of depression and withdrawal"The Damned Ones" with the capital letters always, and she weathered them alone or as alone as she could be. This is why Cornwall mattered so much to her. The landscape gave her what people couldn't. Space wildness and the kind of silence that lets you hear yourself think. When you understand that you understand why her books are so saturated with place, why setting in her works does so much heavy lifting. Why Manderly isn't just a house, it's an entire emotional state. Rebecca was published in 1938, and it was an immediate and enormous sensation. It has never gone out of print. It has sold somewhere in the region of 30 million copies. It is one of the bestselling novels of the 20th century, and it opens with a line so perfect that writing teachers still use it as the gold standard for first sentences."Last night, I dreamt I went to Manderly again." Seven words, eight, if you count again, and they contain everything. The past tense, the dreaming, the again tells you that this is not the first time. That this woman returns to this place in her mind, over and over. Unable to let it go. We know before we know anything else that Manderly is lost, that the narrator is haunted, and that this is a story about the impossibility of escaping the past. Now, the plot. Our narrator, who is never named- a choice that is enormously deliberate and enormously important- as a young woman working as a paid companion to a ghastly American socialite called Mrs. Van Hopper, when she meets a wealthy, brooding, aristocratic Maxim de Winter, in Monte Carlo. Maxim's first wife, Rebecca, drown in the bay near their estate, Manderly the previous year. He's a widower. He is dark and complicated and occasionally quite rude to our narrator in ways that she finds romantic rather than alarming. This is a choice she'll have reason to consider. He proposes to her, somewhat abruptly, and with slightly alarming references to needing her companionship, rather than declarations of passionate love. She accepts they return to Manderly. And this is where the novel really begins, because Manderly isn't simply a house, it's Rebecca's house. Rebecca's presence is everywhere. The furniture is arranged as she arranged it. The menus are the ones she approved. The head housekeeper, Mrs. Danvers, one of literature's great and genuinely terrifying characters, was devoted to Rebecca with an intensity that borders on obsession, and has never accepted her death. Every room, every corridor. Every flower arrangement is a monument to a dead woman. And our narrator, young uncertain, socially inexperienced, desperately in love with Maxim, is slowly suffocating under the weight of her predecessor. Here's what I find so psychologically brilliant about this setup. du Maruier never lets us see Rebecca. We only ever see her through people's descriptions, and those descriptions are wildly contradictory. Mrs. Danvers worships her as a goddess. The local villagers speak of her with admiring awe. Maxim's relatives treat her memory with careful reverence, but gradually, slowly, details don't quite add up. The perfect wife. The perfect hostess, the beautiful accomplished Rebecca. The closer you look, the more the portrait cracks. The narrator is trying to compete with a ghost, which is of course impossible. You cannot out charm someone who is dead, because death has made them perfect and permanent and beyond criticism. The living are always disadvantaged against the idealized dead. If you've ever felt measured against someone's ex-partner or found yourself falling short, you understand exactly how our narrator feels. Du Maurier just gives that feeling, gothic architecture and a Cornish coastline. Let's talk about Mrs. Danvers because she deserves her own moment. Mrs. Danvers,"Danny," is Rebecca's formal personal maid, now housekeeper of Manderly, and she is one of the most chilling supporting characters in 20th century fiction. She's tall, thin, and almost supernaturally still. She moves silently. She appears in doorways without warning. She speaks of Rebecca with a reverence and intimacy that is when you look at it directly, something more than professional devotion. There's a scene midway through the novel, which I won't spoil entirely, but which involves Mrs. Danvers showing the narrator Rebecca's bedroom and her possessions that is so deeply quietly disturbing that it is stated in reader's minds For nearly a century, du Maruierr doesn't label what Mrs feels. She doesn't need to. She simply shows it, and the effect is extraordinary. Mrs. Danvers is, in many ways the emotional heart of the book. Her devotion to Rebecca is the most honest relationship in the novel, raw, complete, and utterly without pretense. Whatever else Rebecca was, she inspired in Mrs. Danvers, a loyalty that transcends death. That's rather remarkable, even if it's also terrifying. Now the twist. I'm going to discuss it because Rebecca has been out since 1938, and I think it's important for understanding what du Maurier was doing. So if you haven't read it yet, maybe pause and come back to this. But you know, you've had almost a hundred years, so get on it. When the truth about Rebecca's death emerges. That Maxim didn't simply fail to save a drowning woman, but actually killed her deliberately after she revealed something about her character and her health that shattered his image of her, the novel does something morally audacious. Our narrator who has spent the entire book being afraid of Rebecca's ghost, learns her husband is a murderer, and she stands by him completely and without hesitation. Moreover. We as readers are positioned to be relieved. We're invited to feel that Rebecca somehow deserved it. That maxim's crime is understandable. That the real villain of the piece was Rebecca herself for being so what? So sexually competent, so independent, so unwilling to be the devoted wife Maxim wanted? du Maurier is doing something very sophisticated here, and critics have argued about it for decades. Is she endorsing the narrator's choice? Is she critiquing it? Is she showing us how completely the narrator has been psychologically subordinated to Maxim's version of reality? Or is she simply writing about how love makes people capable of moral compromise? I think the answer is that she's doing all of these things simultaneously, and that the discomfort you feel in that final selection of the novel is entirely intentional. du Maurier doesn't let you off the hook. You wanted Rebecca to be the villain. And Rebecca is dead, and here you are relieved that a murderer got away with it. What does that say about you? That's not a romance, that's a psychological trap. Very elegantly constructed. Rebecca belongs to a very specific tradition in British literature, what scholars call the female gothic. This is a strand of gothic fiction written primarily by women in which the central terror isn't a monster or a supernatural creature, but a house, a marriage. And the question of what a woman is expected to suppress in order to survive within them. Wuthering Heights anyone?) The tradition runs from Anne Radcliffe in the 18th century, who Emily Bronte was reading. Through the Bronte's themselves, through Wilke Collins, and arrives, fully formed, in du Maurier's Hands in 1938. Manderly is in direct conversation with Weathering Heights and Thornfield Hall. All three are great houses that are also psychological prisons. All three contain dark secrets. All three are ultimately destroyed, but du Maurier adds something The Bronte's didn't have. Cornwall. I wanna talk about Cornwall for a moment, because if you've been there, and if you haven't, I'd strongly encourage you to rectify that, you'll understand immediately why it gave du Maurier everything she needed. Cornwall is geographically distinct from the rest of England in ways that go beyond the obvious. It's Peninsula that thrusts out into the Atlantic. Battered on three sides by the sea. The light is different, sharper and stronger somehow than inland light. The landscape shifts dramatically between the gentle green of the river estuaries and the savage cliff faces of the North coast. There are ancient standing stones and ruined tin mines and villages that feel genuinely cut off from the modern world. It has always attracted artists and writers seeking something wilder and more elemental than Southern England could offer. The Newland School of Painters were there in the 1880s, Virginia Wolf set To the Lighthouse, partly in Cornwall. D.H. Lawrence lived there briefly and found it so spiritually intense, it frightened him. There's something about the place that strips things back. For du Maurier, Cornwall wasn't just a setting, it was a condition of her imagination. She couldn't write what she needed to write anywhere else. When she was separated from it, she became depressed and blocked. When she was there, the work came. This is why the descriptions of Manderly and its gardens and the Cornish coast are among the most beautiful passages in Rebecca. They come from genuine love and genuine knowledge. When the narrator describes the rhododendrons blooming, in blood red along the drive, or the way the sea sounds at night from the cottage on the beach, du Maruier isn't decorating her story. She's giving it its soul. The real Menabilly. The house that became Manderly is still standing. du Maurier leased it from the Rashleigh family in 1943 and lived there for 26 years, restoring it and loving it, and eventually being asked to leave when the lease expired. The loss of Menabilly devastated her. She moved to another house on the Fowey estuary and never quite recovered the sense of belonging she'd had there. There's something almost unbearably appropriate about that. The woman who wrote about a narrator who could never fully possess Manderly, ended up in real life losing her own Manderly. du Maurier lived inside her own metaphors. One of the great injustices in how we talk about du Maruier is that Rebecca has so thoroughly dominated her reputation that her other work is almost invisible, and that other work is extraordinary. Jamaica Inn published in 1936, 2 years before Rebecca, is set on the Wild Bodman Moore and involves a young woman, her terrifying uncle, and the wreckers gangs who lured ships into rocks and plundered the cargo. It's dark, fast, genuinely frightening, and it captures the most savage version of the Cornish landscape. Alfred Hitchcock adapted it in 1939, though du Maurier wasn't entirely happy with what he did to it. She also wrote The Birds. Yes, that one, as a short story, in 1952, Hitchcock's film made it famous. But du Maurier's original story is, in many ways, more disturbing than the movie. It's set in Cornwall rather than California. Its grittier and more ambiguous, and it ends without resolution or explanation. The birds simply attack. No one knows why. It doesn't stop. That refusal to explain is pure du Maurier. She always trusted her readers to sit with discomfort rather than wrapping things up. My cousin Rachel, published in 1951 is perhaps the most sophisticated writing she ever wrote. It's a story of a young Cornish man who becomes obsessed with his cousin's widow, a beautiful, charming, possibly murderous, Italian woman called Rachel. The entire novel is constructed around the question of whether Rachel is innocent or guilty, and du Maruier never answers it. When you finish the book, you genuinely cannot be certain what happened. It's a masterpiece of ambiguity and then there are short stories, particularly Don't Look Now, set in Venice about grief and premonition and a small figure in a red coat. It was adapted into a film in 1973 and is one of the most disturbing short works of the 20th century. If you haven't read it, please do so in daylight. What connects all of this work is du Maurier's absolute understanding that the most frightening things are never the ones you can name and point to. The real terror is always the thing at the edge of your vision, the presence you feel, rather than see the question that won't resolve itself into an answer. She understood the architecture of unease better than almost any writer of her era. For a long time, du Maurier's critical reputation was caught in an awkward middle ground. She was too popular to be taken seriously by literary scholars, too strange and dark to be comfortably shelved as a light romantic reading, too much of a genre writer to get the attention she deserved from people who consider themselves above genre. The critic Q.D. Leavis notoriously dismissed her as a writer of popular trash, which is one of literary criticism's more embarrassing moments in hindsight. But the tide has well and truly turned. Rebecca is now regularly taught in universities alongside other gothic texts. du Maurier's. work has been reexamined through feminist and queer theory lenses and found to be far richer and more complex than its initial reputation suggested. Scholars now recognize that she was doing something genuinely sophisticated using the conventions of popular romance and thriller fiction to explore questions about female identity, sexual transgression, and the violence hidden beneath respectable services that more serious writers were too polite to examine directly. She was also ahead of her time and her treatment of unreliable narrators. The unnamed narrator of Rebecca is one of literature's great unreliable voices. Okay. Not because she lies exactly, but because her perception is so thoroughly distorted by her insecurity and her love for Maxim that she could not see what we, reading carefully, can see. This technique: putting the reader in a position of knowing more than the narrator, was something du Maruier handled with extraordinary sophistication decades before it became fashionable And practically speaking, look at the shadow she casts over contemporary fiction. Gillian Flynn has cited du Maurier as a foundational influence. Ruth Ware, Tana French Kate Morton. The entire tradition of smart psychological setting, saturated literary suspense that dominates bestseller lists today owes an enormous debt to du Maurier's work. When you read Gone Girl or The 13th Tale, or the Secret History, you're reading du Maurier's, grandchildren, She died in 1989 at her home in Cornwall. She spent the last years of her life in a depression so deep, she essentially stopped writing, stopped going out, and retreated almost entirely into herself. It was heartbreaking for those who knew her, and it makes her later work feel all the more precious. But the books remain. And Rebecca, that perfect dark, psychologically devastating novel remains, not just her masterpiece, but one of the great achievements of 20th century British fiction. A book that feels like a dream you can't quite shake even in daylight, even now. All right. Let me give you some wonderful places to go next. If today's episode has pulled you toward du Maurier's world. Start here. If you haven't read Rebecca, please stop whatever you're doing and read it. Clear, weakened, make a lot of tea. Don't read it at night if you're easily unsettled. My Cousin Rachel, is a natural companion piece, arguably, even better constructed than Rebecca. And that ambiguous ending will live on in your head for weeks. For information about Daphne's life, Margaret Forster's biography simply called"Daphne du Maurier" is the definitive account of her life and is beautifully written. Forster had access to du Maurier's private papers and letters, and she handles the complexity of du Maurier's personal life with an intelligence and compassion. It's the biography that finally did justice to how interesting and strange and brilliant du Maurier actually was. For the Gothic tradition. If Rebecca has you wanting to trace female gothics backwards, Charlotte Bronte's, Jane Eyre and Wilkee Collins, the woman in white are the essential predecessors, both concerning women, great houses, and the secrets kept in the dark. We've already covered Jane Eyre on this podcast, so you'll know where to find that episode. For modern heirs, Kate Morton's, The House at Riverton and the Distant Hours are both explicitly du Maurier influenced. The old houses, family secrets, narratives told from a distance. If you love the atmosphere of Rebecca Morton is your next step, and if you want something sharper and more contemporary, Flynn's Gone Girl takes du Maurier's interest in the unknowable woman and drags it into the 21st century with magnificent ruthlessness. For Cornwall itself: if the landscape has enchanted you as much as it has Enchanted du Maurier Denys, Val Baker's The Sea in the Kitchen is a lovely, evocative memoir of Cornish life that captures the world she was writing in. And of course, thebookclubtour.com'cause there really is nothing quite like standing on the Cornish coast in real life, feeling that wind run through every page she wrote. Thank you so much for joining me on this trip down to Cornwall and into the shadowy, gorgeous world of Daphne du Maurier. I hope I've convinced you that she was far more than the author of one famous novel. She was a writer of remarkable psychological sophistication who hid her most radical ideas in plain sight inside books that the world was pleased to call romantic thrillers.