While never a fully assimilated Cornishwoman, du Maurier was certainly inspired by her adopted home, the setting of some of her best and best-known novels: Jamaica Inn (1936), Frenchman's Creek (1941), and The House on the Strand (1969). Cornwall, a region of mystery and superstition and the home of legendary figures such as King Arthur and Tristan and Isolde, is a landscape easily made gothic it is the home, as well, of pirates both fictional and historical, with a coastline that has been responsible for innumerable shipwrecks. Rebecca Daphne du Maurier lived in Cornwall for forty years, twenty-five of them in Menabilly, a seventeenth-century house that she described as the most beautiful she Major Frederick “Boy” Browning and du Maurier married a few months later, setting off by boat on a honeymoon “just like the couple in The Loving Spirit,” according to Nicholas Wade in the Times Literary Supplement. A best seller that achieved a fair share of critical acclaim, The Loving Spirit so impressed a thirty-five-year-old major in the Grenadier Guards that he piloted his motor launch past the du Maurier home in the hope of meeting the author.
During one ten-week stay at her parents' country home on the Cornish coast, the twenty-fouryear-old Englishwoman wrote her first novel, The Loving Spirit, a romantic family chronicle. After shunning the debutante scene and a chance at an acting career, du Maurier was determined to succeed on her own terms- as a writer. She delighted in the imaginary world of books and play-acting and stubbornly resisted “growing up” until her late teens. Despite a happy and financially secure childhood, she often felt “inadequate” and desperately in need of solitude. Her Own Way Daughter of renowned actor Gerald du Maurier and granddaughter of artist and author George du Maurier ( Trilby), young Daphne first turned to writing as a means of escape. Works in Biographical and Historical Context As Margaret Forster wrote for London's Sunday Times, “If all our popular bestsellers were of her excellence then there would be no need to deplore their existence, and the silly snobbery existing between ‘pulp' fiction and literary fiction would vanish.” Though she wrote dozens of novels, short stories, plays, and nonfiction works, she is perhaps best remembered for the film adaptations of her work, including two films by Alfred Hitchcock: Rebecca and The Birds.
Daphne du Maurier was a British author of popular fiction who had the rare quality of being nearly as highly regarded by many critics as she was by her readers.
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