du Maurier’s stories. Her endings are so often ambiguous. Did Rachel
poison Ambrose? Did Mrs Danvers really set fire to Manderley?
Du Maurier’s grandson, Rupert Tower, whom I met while
researching an article marking the 80th anniversary of Rebecca last
year, thinks her appeal lies in her ‘emotional intelligence’. Tower is
a Jungian analyst, an interest inherited from his grandmother. ‘She
has this extraordinary capacity to keep talking about an archetypal
human story, the things we all struggle with in our own families,’ he
says. ‘I think that’s why she continues to speak to people. She’s not
afraid of going into the darkness of human relationships, our mur-
derous capacities, love, jealousy, hate — that makes her so appealing
to a reader.’
Du Maurier, one feels, would have no truck with the recent
publishing trend for ‘uplit’ – cheerful, optimistic works of literature.
Two of her eerie short stories were adapted into famously terrifying
films: Hitchcock’s The Birds and Nicolas Roeg’s master-
piece Don’t Look Now. Another of her earliest stories,
The Doll, concerns a young woman’s passion
for a mechanical sex-doll. It was an extraor-
dinary subject for a privileged 20-year-old
girl, the daughter of the famous actor-
manager Gerald du Maurier, to be
aware of, let alone to explore. There
is a dark, erotic charge to her writ-
ing. Sex, though never explicit, is
always there.
As I sit at my desk, juggling work
with the demands of a young family,
Richard’s escapism in The House on
the Strand once again looks attractive.
But it is du Maurier’s depiction of
‘strong, independent women’ – Dona St
Columb in Frenchman’s Creek, Mary Yellan
in Jamaica Inn – that is drawing in a younger
generation, says a fellow devotee,
Dr Laura Varnam of University
College, Oxford, who finds that her
students are increasingly choosing
to write dissertations on du Maurier.
‘Her preoccupations are remarkably
modern,’ Varnam explains. ‘Although
du Maurier isn’t using the language
we are today about gender fluidity, she
explores her male narrators’ psyches
in a way that’s incredibly fresh.’
And 30 years after her death,
though du Maurier novels are now
p e r i o d p i e c e s , t h e y r e m a i n t i m e l e s s l y
gripping and as relevant as ever. Sarah Perry is the latest novelist to
acknowledge her influence, following Sarah Waters and Susan Hill,
while du Maurier’s final novel, Rule Britannia, published in 1972 but
startlingly prefiguring Brexit, has just been reissued.
With a writer so versatile and prolific – she produced histor-
ical fiction (The King’s General), biography (The Infernal World of
Branwell Brontë), poems and plays – there are many more films
to be made and theses to be written. And in a few years’ time, I
shall be beckoning my own first-born over to my collection of
battered paperbacks. ‘Darling, I think you’re ready for Daphne
du Maurier.’ PHOTOGRAPHS: GETTY IMAGES, MARY EVANS, RANA BEGUM, POLLY APFELBAUM, BRIDGET RILEY17 8 | HARPER’S BAZAAR | October 2019 http://www.harpersbazaar.com/ukTALK ING POINTS
Daphne du Maurier
on the staircase of her
Cornwall home,
Menabilly, in
about 1950. Below
right: in 1931
DARK &
DA NG E R OUS
As The House on the Strand
turns 50 , Flora Watkins reveals
her long-lasting obsession withDaphne du Maurier’s macabre
yet seductive worksLITERATURE
‘Perhaps you’re ready for Daphne du
Maurier,’ said my mother, and the
name alone, so alluring and mys-
terious, lit my imagination as an
adolescent girl.
As I worked my way along the
shelf of 1970s Penguin paperbacks,
their tangerine spines creased where
my mother had returned to certain
passages, great doors swung open, like
the overgrown gates to Manderley in the
second Mrs de Winter’s dream.
It was Rebecca that first made du Maurier
famous, inspiring numerous adaptations and spin-offs
(indeed, a new Netflix film is currently in production, starring
Lily James as the second Mrs de Winter, Kristin Scott Thomas as
Mrs Danvers and Armie Hammer as Maxim). Here was a seductive,
compelling world, a glimpse of the darkest recesses of the human
heart, a hint of what relationships between men and women might
involve. No other writer I had read created such a tapestry of atmos-
phere and tension, such a sense of place.
But it was du Maurier’s penultimate book The House on the Strand,
published exactly 50 years ago, that intrigued me most. The narrator
Richard Young, tired of his work, wife and stepsons, begins experi-
menting with a hallucinogenic drug developed by his scientist
friend, Magnus. His trips on the drug, while staying at Magnus’
house in Cornwall, take him back 600 years as a silent witness to lives
more fascinating than his own.
Perhaps it resonated because I, too, was weary, stifled by the
Suffolk countryside of my childhood and longing for diversion and
excitement. The House on the Strand, l i ke s o m a ny du M a u r ie r nove l s ,
c h i m e d w i t h m y o w n n a s c e n t s u s p i c i o n s t h a t a w a y f r o m t h e c o t t a g e
gardens and cricket matches of my village, things might not be as
respectable as they seemed.
Whether the sinister vicar of Altarnun preaching to his unsus-
pecting flock in Jamaica Inn or the enigmatic Rachel brewing her
tisanes in My Cousin Rachel, we are never quite sure whom to trust in