Latest news with #duMaurier
Mint
06-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Mint
Travel: Journey through Cornwall's iconic literary sites
Daphne du Maurier may have been born in London, but the British author lost her heart to Cornwall's rugged beauty and haunting atmosphere. This deep and lifelong connection led her to draw heavily on the county's coastline, moors, and mysterious histories, turning them into settings that shaped the mood and characters of her novels. Born in 1907, Daphne and her two sisters had a privileged childhood, growing up at the family home, Cannon Hall in Hampstead, but the family often trooped to Cornwall for holidays. 'The family started looking for a second home and zeroed in on Ferryside, the house that became their home in the waterside town of Fowey on Cornwall's south coast," says Viv Kelly, the proprietor of Old Bissick Mill, a charming B&B located in Ladock, about 18 miles from Fowey. On learning of my plans to follow in du Maurier's footsteps, Kelly reveals that Ferryside is where the author wrote The Loving Spirit (1931), which was followed by 'moody and resonant" romantic stories set on the wild coast of Cornwall. These included Jamaica Inn (1936), a period piece set in Cornwall; Rebecca (1938), the Gothic mystery she's best known for; Frenchman's Creek (1941), a historical novel; My Cousin Rachel (1951), a mystery romance similar in theme to Rebecca, The Apple Tree (1952), a short story collection that included The Birds and Don't Look Now, a long story collection (1971); her autobiography Growing Pains (1977), and The Rendezvous and Other Stories (1980). Alfred Hitchcock made both Jamaica Inn and The Birds into films. Du Maurier wrote a total of 38 books, but her Cornwall-based novels remain the most popular with readers. Topping the list is Rebecca, which showcases her love for atmospheric Cornwall and her own home. The sinister manor of Manderley, surrounded by wild woods and crashing seas, draws clear inspiration from Menabilly, the mansion near Fowey that du Maurier leased and lived in for over two decades. 'She came across it in a serendipitous way. During a visit to Fowey in 1926, she stumbled upon it while walking in the woods; it was set among thick trees and—like Manderley—had a long, sprawling driveway," says Ellen Porter, a server and fellow du Maurier fan at Brown Sugar, a popular coffee shop in Fowey. We agree that her first sighting of Menabilly may have influenced her first lines about Manderley: 'There was Manderley, our Manderley, secretive and silent as it had always been, the grey stone shining in the moonlight of my dream, the mullioned windows reflecting the green lawns and the terrace." Manderley was a character in its own right in Rebecca—gloomy, romantic, and full of secrets. I realise that Cornwall offered du Maurier more than just scenery—it provided history, folklore, and a sense of timelessness. Her fascination with the past, memory, and identity, often emerged through stories linked to Cornwall's layered history—and her own narratives. Among the most famous of all du Maurier locations is Jamaica Inn, a former coach house and smugglers' den that dates back to 1750. The author landed up at the inn with a friend in 1930, after getting lost on a dark, foggy Bodmin moor. In her diary, she later wrote, 'In the afternoon, we ventured out across the moors, desolate, (and) sinister, and foolishly (we) lost our way. To our horror, rain and darkness fell upon us…(by) a miracle we saw in the distance the light from Jamaica Inn." In Growing Pains, decades later, she wrote of the inn: 'I thought of the travellers in the past who must have sought shelter there on wild November nights … the drinking deep and long, fights breaking out, the sound of oaths, men falling." The inn and its surroundings fed directly into Jamaica Inn's tense, windswept setting, showing du Maurier's gift for transforming real places into vivid literary landscapes. The inn now offers a suite named after the author, showcasing her Sheraton writing desk and a small bowl of her favourite Glacier Mints. 'There's also a small du Maurier museum with three rooms of exhibits, including original letters from the Queen to Daphne and her husband, letters by Daphne to her best friend, numerous old photos, and more," Porter tells me. In her later years, du Maurier moved to Kilmarth, a house that served as the inspiration for House on the Strand, published in 1969. Kelly tells me about another major influence: Frenchman's Creek, near Helford River. 'She visited it on her honeymoon, and the densely wooded banks later inspired her novel of the same name." In Fowey, the Daphne du Maurier Literary Centre showcases exhibits and information on the author's life and legacy. Every year, the du Maurier Society hosts the du Maurier Fowey Literary Festival in May, the month of the author's birth. 'Not many people know that in 1967 she also penned a local history and travel guide," says Porter Du Maurier's love for Cornwall shines through in her guide, Vanishing Cornwall. 'I walked this land with a dreamer's freedom and with a waking man's perception—places, houses whispered to me their secrets and shared with me their sorrows and their joys. And in return I gave them something of myself, a few words passing into the folk-lore of this ancient place." The author's words made Cornwall more than a backdrop; they made the county central to the tension, mystery, and drama of her plots. As I walked in her footsteps—from Fowey's quiet streets to the windswept moors and hidden coves—I realised that Daphne du Maurier's Cornwall lives on, not only in geography, but in the minds of her fans who have long felt the pull of her haunting and enduring stories. Teja Lele writes on travel and lifestyle.
The Age
09-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Age
It's time to meet the mystery woman behind Hitchcock's greatest hits
Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again.' It's often cited as one of literature's greatest openings: in just a few words Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca conjures its narrator's voice, its haunting setting and the tone that will carry the rest of the mysterious novel. In the 1950s du Maurier was Britain's highest earning female author. This year Malthouse Theatre will mount an adaptation of her story The Birds, while Melbourne Theatre Company will take on Rebecca. If you know du Maurier's name but not much more, it's a fine time to get better acquainted. Melbourne film writer Alexandra Heller-Nicholas lists du Maurier among her favourite authors. 'I'm actually surprised that more of her work hasn't been adapted. Her short stories are made for film. There's something really slippery about them that I find so beautiful, but also quite discomforting.' Like many, Heller-Nicholas came to du Maurier through Alfred Hitchcock. The master of suspense adapted three of du Maurier's tales – The Birds, Rebecca and the novel Jamaica Inn – but the long shadow he cast means that today most people associate those titles with the director, not the writer. For all their strengths, Hitchcock's films don't capture the extraordinary intimacy of du Maurier's prose. Heller-Nicholas calls Rebecca one of the great Gothic stories, comparing it to Henry James' The Turn of the Screw. 'It's a story about how reality can't keep up with a fantasy. It's powerful and it's dark and it's beautiful and it's intimate. Rebecca reads like somebody's whispering into your ear.' MTC artistic director Anne-Louise Sarks was living in London when she first happened upon a copy of Rebecca. She was bewitched. 'She draws you into the inner world of the characters, their fears and their fantasies, and then suddenly things get very complicated and the drama escalates. It is thrilling. This is a romance that becomes a mystery and it is thick with suspense.' The other reason Rebecca stayed with Sarks is that 'it was so ahead of its time. It's bold and her writing captures a wit and humour that still feels very fresh. Daphne du Maurier was speaking in a very sophisticated, coded way to women at the time and all these years later she still speaks to me.' Sarks says that du Maurier's ability to create landscapes through language is a gift to anyone trying to adapt her work. '(Her) writing is incredibly evocative. It's poetic and muscular. She crafts vivid descriptions of the trees, the flowers, the rhododendrons and azaleas, and of the woods surrounding Manderley. The natural world is another character in the book and in our production too.' Then there's the haunting (and perhaps haunted) setting of Manderley. The gothic manor was modelled on Menabilly, a gorgeous country home in Cornwall that du Maurier discovered as a teenager and later restored. In private letters she often spoke of her love for the estate she called home for more than 20 years, and in a later essay on Rebecca she described it in terms as lavish and vivid as any of her fictions: 'At midnight, when the children sleep, and all is hushed and still, I sit down at the piano and look at the panelled walls, and slowly, softly, with no one there to see, the house whispers her secrets, and the secrets turn to stories, and in strange and eerie fashion we are at one, the house and I.' Du Maurier's life off the page was as interesting as anything she invented. Born into a sprawling dynasty of actors, authors and artists, she led a tomboyish childhood that translated itself into what she called the 'male energy' that fuelled her writing. She was rankled when people cast her as a romance novelist, but as the decades have passed her reputation as a serious literary talent has grown. She was a contradictory figure, described by some as reclusive and by others as a warm and witty host. She could be proud, but her own family only discovered she'd been made a Dame when they read it in the newspaper. Loading Du Maurier's elusive character is mirrored in her writing; even when grounded in reality, something unsettling hovers beneath the surface. Du Maurier's delicate use of the paranormal brings to mind Shirley Jackson, another mid-century author whose work frequently produced a sense of the eerie. 'The parallels with Shirley Jackson are really interesting,' says Heller-Nicholas. 'Whether we want to call them capital-F feminist writers or not is obviously open to debate, but certainly these are two writers who at their best were interested in the gendered experience. They really understood how the fantastic is a language to explore that.' The Birds is one of du Maurier's most effective short stories. Unlike Hitchcock's sunny version, the original takes place in grey Cornwall, where a farmer and his family find themselves under inexplicable avian attack. As it becomes clear that this violence is both coordinated and occurring across the country, the beleaguered victims find their chances of rescue dwindling while their questions only grow. Malthouse artistic director Matt Lutton hit upon du Maurier's short story while pondering the possibility of 'adrenaline and terror in the theatre. How can we create something that will really have a big bodily impact on audiences?' He recalled that Hitchcock's adaptation had terrified him, but when he came to the original tale he found so much more to play with. He took the idea to writer Louise Fox. She called it a no-brainer: 'Du Maurier's a deeply adaptable writer, for theatre, for film, for other mediums ... Her metaphors stay open, and her use of genre and the paranormal and the mysterious is very evocative. It's weird because she was always considered a romance writer. But actually, she's a writer about anxiety and paranoia and fear and overthinking. She's probably got more in common with Kafka than she has with a romance novelist.' Critic Mark Fisher has attributed the eeriness of du Maurier's tales to the way they reveal how our attempts at making sense of the world are laughably fragile. Birds shouldn't attack en masse. Rebecca should stay dead, or at least have the decency to out herself as a ghost. Fox agrees that the sense of fighting something you can't even explain is something people of all eras can understand: 'The desperate attempt to try and make sense of something that is incomprehensible or unexplainable or hard to define.' Lutton and Fox's adaptation will be performed by one woman (Paula Arundell) complemented by a rich soundscape piped through headphones straight to audience members' ears. The director says his aim is 'to tap into that very primal animal instinct of what it means to feel attacked. We all know what it is to be swooped by birds. You naturally protect your eyes, your ears, and I think that's about feeling, in a metaphorical way, like something much larger than you, that you definitely can't control, is assaulting you.' He jokes that audience members fleeing their seats would be a sign of success, but also notes that 'there are no birds in the theatre. It's sound and it's light and it's a performer. It's the power of a ghost story or a campfire story. When you tell a campfire story, you start to see the story in the shadows around the fire.' As long as we keep telling stories, hopefully, du Maurier's shadows will keep offering up their secrets.
Sydney Morning Herald
09-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Sydney Morning Herald
It's time to meet the mystery woman behind Hitchcock's greatest hits
Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again.' It's often cited as one of literature's greatest openings: in just a few words Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca conjures its narrator's voice, its haunting setting and the tone that will carry the rest of the mysterious novel. In the 1950s du Maurier was Britain's highest earning female author. This year Malthouse Theatre will mount an adaptation of her story The Birds, while Melbourne Theatre Company will take on Rebecca. If you know du Maurier's name but not much more, it's a fine time to get better acquainted. Melbourne film writer Alexandra Heller-Nicholas lists du Maurier among her favourite authors. 'I'm actually surprised that more of her work hasn't been adapted. Her short stories are made for film. There's something really slippery about them that I find so beautiful, but also quite discomforting.' Like many, Heller-Nicholas came to du Maurier through Alfred Hitchcock. The master of suspense adapted three of du Maurier's tales – The Birds, Rebecca and the novel Jamaica Inn – but the long shadow he cast means that today most people associate those titles with the director, not the writer. For all their strengths, Hitchcock's films don't capture the extraordinary intimacy of du Maurier's prose. Heller-Nicholas calls Rebecca one of the great Gothic stories, comparing it to Henry James' The Turn of the Screw. 'It's a story about how reality can't keep up with a fantasy. It's powerful and it's dark and it's beautiful and it's intimate. Rebecca reads like somebody's whispering into your ear.' MTC artistic director Anne-Louise Sarks was living in London when she first happened upon a copy of Rebecca. She was bewitched. 'She draws you into the inner world of the characters, their fears and their fantasies, and then suddenly things get very complicated and the drama escalates. It is thrilling. This is a romance that becomes a mystery and it is thick with suspense.' The other reason Rebecca stayed with Sarks is that 'it was so ahead of its time. It's bold and her writing captures a wit and humour that still feels very fresh. Daphne du Maurier was speaking in a very sophisticated, coded way to women at the time and all these years later she still speaks to me.' Sarks says that du Maurier's ability to create landscapes through language is a gift to anyone trying to adapt her work. '(Her) writing is incredibly evocative. It's poetic and muscular. She crafts vivid descriptions of the trees, the flowers, the rhododendrons and azaleas, and of the woods surrounding Manderley. The natural world is another character in the book and in our production too.' Then there's the haunting (and perhaps haunted) setting of Manderley. The gothic manor was modelled on Menabilly, a gorgeous country home in Cornwall that du Maurier discovered as a teenager and later restored. In private letters she often spoke of her love for the estate she called home for more than 20 years, and in a later essay on Rebecca she described it in terms as lavish and vivid as any of her fictions: 'At midnight, when the children sleep, and all is hushed and still, I sit down at the piano and look at the panelled walls, and slowly, softly, with no one there to see, the house whispers her secrets, and the secrets turn to stories, and in strange and eerie fashion we are at one, the house and I.' Du Maurier's life off the page was as interesting as anything she invented. Born into a sprawling dynasty of actors, authors and artists, she led a tomboyish childhood that translated itself into what she called the 'male energy' that fuelled her writing. She was rankled when people cast her as a romance novelist, but as the decades have passed her reputation as a serious literary talent has grown. She was a contradictory figure, described by some as reclusive and by others as a warm and witty host. She could be proud, but her own family only discovered she'd been made a Dame when they read it in the newspaper. Loading Du Maurier's elusive character is mirrored in her writing; even when grounded in reality, something unsettling hovers beneath the surface. Du Maurier's delicate use of the paranormal brings to mind Shirley Jackson, another mid-century author whose work frequently produced a sense of the eerie. 'The parallels with Shirley Jackson are really interesting,' says Heller-Nicholas. 'Whether we want to call them capital-F feminist writers or not is obviously open to debate, but certainly these are two writers who at their best were interested in the gendered experience. They really understood how the fantastic is a language to explore that.' The Birds is one of du Maurier's most effective short stories. Unlike Hitchcock's sunny version, the original takes place in grey Cornwall, where a farmer and his family find themselves under inexplicable avian attack. As it becomes clear that this violence is both coordinated and occurring across the country, the beleaguered victims find their chances of rescue dwindling while their questions only grow. Malthouse artistic director Matt Lutton hit upon du Maurier's short story while pondering the possibility of 'adrenaline and terror in the theatre. How can we create something that will really have a big bodily impact on audiences?' He recalled that Hitchcock's adaptation had terrified him, but when he came to the original tale he found so much more to play with. He took the idea to writer Louise Fox. She called it a no-brainer: 'Du Maurier's a deeply adaptable writer, for theatre, for film, for other mediums ... Her metaphors stay open, and her use of genre and the paranormal and the mysterious is very evocative. It's weird because she was always considered a romance writer. But actually, she's a writer about anxiety and paranoia and fear and overthinking. She's probably got more in common with Kafka than she has with a romance novelist.' Critic Mark Fisher has attributed the eeriness of du Maurier's tales to the way they reveal how our attempts at making sense of the world are laughably fragile. Birds shouldn't attack en masse. Rebecca should stay dead, or at least have the decency to out herself as a ghost. Fox agrees that the sense of fighting something you can't even explain is something people of all eras can understand: 'The desperate attempt to try and make sense of something that is incomprehensible or unexplainable or hard to define.' Lutton and Fox's adaptation will be performed by one woman (Paula Arundell) complemented by a rich soundscape piped through headphones straight to audience members' ears. The director says his aim is 'to tap into that very primal animal instinct of what it means to feel attacked. We all know what it is to be swooped by birds. You naturally protect your eyes, your ears, and I think that's about feeling, in a metaphorical way, like something much larger than you, that you definitely can't control, is assaulting you.' He jokes that audience members fleeing their seats would be a sign of success, but also notes that 'there are no birds in the theatre. It's sound and it's light and it's a performer. It's the power of a ghost story or a campfire story. When you tell a campfire story, you start to see the story in the shadows around the fire.' As long as we keep telling stories, hopefully, du Maurier's shadows will keep offering up their secrets.
