Daphne DuMaurier walking with her children in front of Menabilly (fictionalized into Manderley)
Dear friends and readers,
As this is a blog not just on Austen and her contemporaries and the long 18th century, but also on women’s art, I thought I’d record a proposal to explore with a group of retired and adult learners the life and work of Daphne DuMaurier; if accepted, this would be for a 5 weeks this summera the OLLI at Mason:
The worlds of Daphne DuMaurier
Daphne DuMaurier is far more than the writer of a single powerful Manderley novel, Rebecca, and not just a writer of women’s romances (and thus underrated) and material for Hitchcock to make movies from. She wrote gothic and Cornish romances; historical and regional novels; travel books, including time-travellers; insightful biographies (of her father, the great actor, Gerald DuMaurier, of Branwell Bronte) and autobiographical books; family sagas; eerie and terrifying short stories, and transgressive murder mysteries; and realistic novels too. I propose to explore her marvelous oeuvre with those who’d want to do this. For summer we’d read, to begin with, one of her historical Manderley novels, The King’s General, and one of her haunting travel books, Vanishing Cornwall. It is suggested that students see the 2007 biographical film, Daphne, the screenplay by her biographer, Margaret Forster, featuring Geraldine Somerville as DuMaurier.
If rejected, I’ll save this for another time at the OLLI at AU. if it were for a fall semester, I’d do a third book, probably her biography of her father.
The great biography of DuMaurier is by Margaret Forster. I should say I’ve never read a book by Forster I didn’t like. You could call DuMaurier bisexual but the marriage to Browning was something of a veneer even if she had 3 children: her long-time relationships were with Ellen Doubleday (played by Elizabeth McGovern in the film) and Gertrude Lawrence (Janet McTeer). (She was also a friend of Noel Coward’s.)
She had a good deal of the chatelaine English type in her outward social life, but in her books she loves to cross-dress. She’s a powerful biographer and romancer, Menabilly meant a lot, but it would be going against all I am to give a falsifying dumbed wn course on this woman, perpetuating stereotypes which reverse some of her significance, erase it. There is evidence to suggest that far from identifying with the second Mrs DeWinter, she bonded with Rebecca and meant us to see Max as a tyrant. In The King’s General, which takes place in the 17th century, during the English civil war, the heroine is crippled very early on (badly, she must stay in a wheelchair) so she has a central disabled character. She identifies with heroes and transgressive characters.
Nina Auerbach (who also writes transgressively on Austen) has a perceptive informative literary biography of DuMaurier, Haunted Heiress, and Avril Horner with Sue Zlosnik on DuMaurier as a gothic and Cornish regional and historical woman novelist. I’d love a chance to read more of her novels, memoirs, life-writing, letters, and other essays on her and the films made from her books.
It’s unfortunate that most of the films from her work that are famous were made by Hitchcock, which turned her work into his usual nasty school of cruelty and misogyny. It’s their fame which has partly framed her work popularly. I did like the take on DuMaurier in the movie Daphne as brooding often solitary writer embedded in her a chosen landscape.
I’ve 33 books altogether, some on Cornwall and linked to the writing and life of Winston Graham.
A Cornish Seascape
How I’ve loved her books and would love to read more of them and more books on her and the film adaptations.
Ellen dreaming perhaps
Reveries Under the Sign of Austen, Two 
I’ve order The King’s General from the book depository; it’s the Virago edition. What other film did Hitchcock make of her work besides Rebecca?
Let me just say I don’t think DuMaurier is a great writer; to me she’s a genius manque. She lacks consciousness of what she’s doing — rather like Richardson; she has less excuse than Austen because by her era Freudianism had dissolved the veils that kept from the public and many writers some central sources of great art. I like her because her outlook fitted mine, especially when I was much younger; this time through I hope to be able to see her politics in ways I didn’t before the 1990s.
To answer Elaine’s query: Hitchcock made a number of films from DuMaurier’s work and he made her big money (as he made Winston Graham). She (like Graham) also allowed Hitchcock free reign; unlike Graham, she insisted her name be prominent. These films beyond the first Rebecca include Frenchman’s Creek, Jamaica Inn, The Birds. Joan Fontaine was chosen as heroine again and again. There are essays (at least one) on these films showing how Hitchcock would reverse some of the meanings of DuMaurier’s texts.
The Telegraph gives two more films by two other film-makers:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/theatre/drama/3635684/Five-Daphne-du-Maurier-adaptations.html
Daphne is the first one where the film-makers are all women. I’d like to see a Rebecca done by Sandy Welch … It might be interesting to see the genres these films fit into — for filming the gothic makes for problems; most of the time horror films are just crass misogyny. Yet film noir doesn’t hack it altogether: there’s a need for the supernatural if only psychologically projected. The first 3/4s of George Cukor’s Gaslight comes to mind as right for DuMaurier.
Ellen
To another off blog comment: She has an interesting family history: she comes from the middling elite and an artistic group and has French ancestry that is traceable, and these she uses in her earlier books. House on the Strand is from the later books which include time-travelling; I don’t know the earlier and later books well enough and would like to read more of them. She wrote an an enormous amount …
Another very useful book is Martyn Shallowcross’s The private world of Daphe DuMaurier. Its limitation is its strength: he’s an insider, knew her and her family; so it’s slanted but it is concise and offers a lot of real information. Her daughter wrote about her too: Flavia Leng: A Daughter’s Memoir. Like Austen, she’s fiercely protected by her family (why the bisexuality and unconventional life is kept under wraps); but that this is no Mommie Dearest — Leng loves her mother — speaks well of DuMaurier the way (if deconstructionist-feminist modern critics can stretch minds to take this in) JEAL’s memoir and love for his aunt speaks well of JA (I can’t resist saying, on the other hand, Anna Austen Lefroy’s love for this aunt, loyalty to her speaks well of Anna’s capacity for forgiveness … )