1907 - 1989

An English novelist, biographer, and playwright, who published romantic suspense novels, mostly set on the coast of Cornwall. Du Maurier is best known for Rebecca (1938), filmed by Alfred Hitchcock in 1940.

Daphne du Maurier was born in London. She came from an artistic family. Her father was the actor-manager Sir Gerald du Maurier and she was the granddaughter of caricaturist George du Maurier. One of her ancestors was Mary Anne Clarke, the mistress of the duke of York, second son of King George III. She later became the heroine of du Maurier's novel Mary Anne (1954). In 1831 Mary Anne Clarke's daughter married Louis-Mathurin Busson du Maurier. The Glass Blowers (1963) was a novel about the Busson family. Her own father she portrayed in Gerald (1934).

Du Maurier grew up in a lively London household where friends like J.M. Barrie and Edgar Wallace visited frequently. Her uncle, a magazine editor, published one of her stories when she was a teenager and got her a literary agent. Du Maurier attended schools in London, Meudon, France, and Paris. In her childhood she was a voracious reader, she was fascinated by imaginary worlds and developed a male alter ego for herself. Du Maurier also had a male narrator in several novels. Her first book, The Loving Spirit, appeared in 1931. It was followed by Jamaica Inn (1936), a historical tale of smugglers, which was bought for the movies, and directed by Alfred Hitchcock - later Hitchcock also used her short story 'The Birds', a tense tale of nature turning on humanity. Frenchman's Creek, a pirate romance, was filmed in 1944. My Cousin Rachel (1951) was made into film in 1952.

In 1932 du Maurier married to Lieutenant Colonel Frederick Arthur Montague Browning II, who was knighted for his distinguished service during World War II. They were happily married for thirty-three years and had three children; Browning died in 1965. Du Maurier was made dame in 1969 for her literary distinction. She died on April 19, 1989. Her pictorial memoir, Enchanted Cornwall, appeared posthumously in 1992. With her son, Christian, she published Vanishing Cornwall in 1967. Like Rebecca, many of her novels and short stories were set in Cornwall, England's westernmost county, whose wild, stormy weather and wild past inspired her imagination. "Here was the freedom I desired, long sought-for, not yet known," she wrote in Vanishing Cornwall. "Freedom to write, to walk, to wander, freedom to climb hills, to pull a boat, to be alone." Du Maurier's home was at a seventeenth-century mansion, Menabilly, overlooking the sea, for a quarter of a century. The house became the scene of her historical novel The King's General (1946).

Besides popular novels du Maurier published short stories, plays and biographies, among others Branwell Brontë's, the brother of sisters Anne, Charlotte, and Emily. Her biography of Francis Bacon, an English statesman in the 1500s and 1600s, appeared in 1976. Du Maurier's autobiography, Growing Pains, was published when she was 70. In the late 1950s, du Maurier began to take interest in the supernatural. During this period she wrote several stories, which explored fears and paranoid fantasies, among them 'The Pool', in which a young girl glimpses a magical world in the woods, but is later barred from it, and 'The Blue Lenses', in which a woman sees everyone around her having the head of an animal. In 1970 appeared her second collection of short stories, Not After Midnight, which included 'Don't Look Now', a tale set in Venice, involving a psychic old lady, a man with the sixth sense, and a murderous dwarf. A film version of the story, directed by Nicholas Roeg, was made in 1973. 

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