Daphne du Maurier Biography Quotes 7 Report mistakes

Early Life and Family
Daphne du Maurier was born in London in 1907 into a celebrated theatrical and literary family that shaped her imagination and career. Her father, Sir Gerald du Maurier, was a leading actor-manager of the West End, and her mother, Muriel Beaumont, had been an actress; their circle exposed Daphne and her sisters, Angela and Jeanne, to the creative life from an early age. Her grandfather, George du Maurier, was a famed Punch cartoonist and novelist whose book Trilby became a 19th-century sensation, establishing a family legacy of storytelling and popular success. The playwright J. M. Barrie, a close friend of her father and the creator of Peter Pan, was part of the wider artistic milieu around the household, reinforcing an early sense that stories could cross from page to stage with a life of their own. Educated partly in Paris and steeped in theatre culture, Daphne began writing stories as a teenager, honing a lucid style and a taste for atmosphere, ambiguity, and narrative surprise.

Formative Years in Cornwall
The place that most decisively imprinted her imagination was Cornwall. As a young woman she spent extended periods at Ferryside, the family home at Bodinnick, near Fowey, exploring the creeks, estuaries, and moorland that later became the landscapes of Jamaica Inn, Frenchman's Creek, and The King's General. Cornwall gave her a geography of wind, tide, and ruin that she could turn into moral weather: houses that felt haunted by memory, coastlines that suggested flight or concealment, and villages that kept old secrets. The people and maritime history of the area fed her first novel, The Loving Spirit, which drew on the life of a local shipbuilding family and confirmed the promise of a writer with a novelist's eye and a ballad-singer's ear. She would remain rooted to Cornwall for most of her life, returning to it as a dwelling place and as a creative reservoir whenever fame or family obligations pulled her elsewhere.

Breakthrough and Major Works
After The Loving Spirit came a burst of productivity: I'll Never Be Young Again, Julius, then the brooding Cornwall tale Jamaica Inn. The international breakthrough followed with Rebecca, published in 1938, a novel whose nameless narrator, forbidding house, and absent yet all-powerful title character created a template for modern romantic suspense. Frenchman's Creek, Hungry Hill, and The King's General sustained the momentum during and after the war, each revisiting themes of power, desire, and the persistence of the past. Later major works included The Parasites, My Cousin Rachel, The Scapegoat, and the time-slip novel The House on the Strand. Her short fiction showed a different edge: The Birds, Don't Look Now, and other tales compressed her preoccupations into precise shocks, often ending with a twist that felt both uncanny and inevitable. Although she was frequently labeled a romantic novelist, her best work is hard, controlled, and morally ambiguous, and it proved remarkably adaptable to other media.

Stage and Screen
Daphne's literary life intersected powerfully with theatre and cinema, and the people who brought her work to wider audiences became part of her story. Alfred Hitchcock adapted Jamaica Inn and Rebecca for the screen and later turned The Birds into a film that bore his own unmistakable signature while preserving the story's cold dread. Producer David O. Selznick shepherded the film of Rebecca, which starred Joan Fontaine and Laurence Olivier, with Judith Anderson as the indelible Mrs. Danvers, giving the novel a second, global life. Du Maurier herself wrote for the stage, including The Years Between and September Tide, drawing on the craft she absorbed from Gerald du Maurier and the West End. The dialogues among writer, director, producer, and actors helped define the public image of her work, even as she continued to write fiction that resisted easy categorization or formula.

Marriage and Children
In 1932 she married Frederick Arthur Montague "Boy" Browning, a career officer who later became a central figure in the development of British airborne forces during the Second World War. Their meeting had a literary spark: he had read The Loving Spirit and sought her out, and the shared romance of sea and adventure became part of their bond. They made homes for their growing family in Cornwall, raising three children, Tessa, Flavia, and Christian, known as "Kits", while navigating the demands of her work and his military career. Browning's wartime service and later duties in the royal household kept him in the public eye, introducing yet another sphere of institutions and personalities to their lives, even as Daphne guarded her privacy and relied on the discipline of daily writing. The marriage, by turns companionable and strained, endured decades and shaped the cadence of her output until his death in the mid-1960s.

Menabilly and the Power of Place
The house most bound to her name was Menabilly, a secluded property on the Rashleigh estate near Fowey. Daphne discovered it in youth, leased it as an adult, and restored it with care; it became both a family home and the imaginative template for Manderley in Rebecca. The relationship with the Rashleigh family, owners of Menabilly, and with local tenants and tradespeople formed a private web of loyalties that sustained her. When the lease ended years later she moved to nearby Kilmarth, carrying forward the same ritual of solitary work, long walks, and immersion in the history layered in walls, fields, and tides. To readers and visitors alike, these houses came to symbolize the fusion of personal and creative life that marked her career.

Nonfiction, Biography, and Memoir
Du Maurier wrote with equal intensity about real lives. She portrayed her father in Gerald: A Portrait, examined the doomed gifts of Branwell Bronte in The Infernal World of Branwell Bronte, and later turned to the Bacons in Golden Lads and The Winding Stair. Vanishing Cornwall distilled her love of place into an elegy for a changing landscape. In her autobiographical volume Growing Pains (published in some editions as Myself When Young), she traced the shaping of a writer, focusing on the personal apprenticeship that preceded fame. Her long relationship with her American publishers at Doubleday, and her friendship with Ellen Doubleday, connected her to a transatlantic readership; her correspondence, preserved and later shared by friends such as the writer Oriel Malet, shows a voice at once practical, wry, and fiercely protective of her work.

Reputation, Honours, and Working Method
Public recognition came steadily, culminating in her appointment as a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire in the late 1960s. She accepted honours cautiously and publicity even more so, preferring the quiet rigour of a desk, a daily quota of pages, and the company of dogs and sea air to interviews or literary London. Editors such as Victor Gollancz in Britain and the team at Doubleday in the United States played crucial roles in shaping her publications and managing the afterlife of film and stage adaptations, yet she held fast to her instincts about structure, pace, and endings. Her working method was austere: months of reading and walking, followed by concentrated drafts that rarely needed wholesale revision because the architecture had been settled in her head.

Later Years
In the final decades she continued to publish, experimenting with forms and returning to concerns that had haunted her since youth: the pull of the past, the doubleness of identity, and the unreliable stories people tell themselves. She endured the loss of friends and family with the reserve that had long been her armour, and found in Kilmarth a setting for late work and reflection. Though public appearances were rare, her readership remained large, kept alive by reprints, school syllabuses, and the regular revival of film and television adaptations. She died in Cornwall in 1989, at home in the county that had become the ground of her life and art.

Themes, Craft, and Legacy
Daphne du Maurier's fiction holds its force because it refuses to reassure. Characters misread one another; landscapes conceal histories; endings unsettle rather than resolve. The women at the centre of her narratives are not passive romantic heroines but thinkers and strategists, and even their misjudgments come from intelligence alive to the risks of desire and the pressure of circumstance. She married the high polish of popular storytelling to a psychological acuity that critics increasingly recognize, placing her alongside 20th-century novelists who use genre to ask fundamental questions about freedom, fate, and self-knowledge. The directors, publishers, and actors who helped carry her stories into world culture, Hitchcock, Selznick, Fontaine, Olivier, Anderson, and others, extended her reach, but the underlying appeal remains on the page: a precise, propulsive sentence, a house with a history, and a narrator who is not sure where the truth lies. Her legacy endures in the continued life of Rebecca and My Cousin Rachel, in short stories that still shock, and in the idea of Cornwall as both a real place and a metaphoric country that readers return to, as she did, for revelation and refuge.

Our collection contains 7 quotes who is written by Daphne, under the main topics: Writing - Book - Romantic - Happiness.