British · b. 1907
Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature; DBE (1969)
Daphne du Maurier was a British novelist whose Rebecca became one of the bestselling novels of the twentieth century and defined the modern Gothic thriller — though her range extended far beyond that single masterpiece.
Daphne du Maurier was born in London in 1907 into a literary family — her grandfather was George du Maurier, author of Trilby — and grew up between London and the Cornwall coast that would become the landscape of her imagination. She published her first novel at twenty-four, but it was Rebecca in 1938 that made her famous: a Gothic thriller of such atmospheric power that it sold millions of copies, was adapted by Alfred Hitchcock the following year, and established the template for the domestic psychological thriller that contemporary fiction has followed ever since.
Du Maurier is frequently reduced to the author of Rebecca, which does her a disservice. Her range across her career was considerable: Jamaica Inn and My Cousin Rachel are psychological thrillers rooted in the Cornish landscape; Frenchman’s Creek is a romantic adventure; The House on the Strand is an innovative time-travel novel; The Birds, her most famous short story, is a masterpiece of the uncanny that Hitchcock adapted into one of his greatest films. What runs through all of her work is an obsessive relationship with Cornwall — with its coast, its moors, its fog, and its capacity to swallow secrets — and a persistent interest in the unreliable surfaces of romantic love.
Her reputation suffered after her death, as she came to be seen primarily as a writer of popular Gothic romance — a categorisation that understates her formal sophistication and her genuine capacity for psychological disturbance. My Cousin Rachel is a sustained exercise in narrative ambiguity that has no resolution; The Birds refuses the explanations that Hitchcock’s film provides; The House on the Strand uses a science-fiction premise to explore the ways in which obsession with the past destroys the present. Du Maurier was a more complex and unsettling writer than her popular image suggests.
by Daphne du Maurier
A young woman marries the brooding Maxim de Winter and moves to his grand estate Manderley, where the memory of his glamorous first wife Rebecca poisons every room and every relationship.
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by Daphne du Maurier
Philip Ashley becomes obsessed with Rachel — the widow who may have poisoned his cousin Ambrose in Italy and who may now be poisoning Philip. Du Maurier's most disturbing novel is an exercise in sustained ambiguity that never resolves.
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by Daphne du Maurier
The title story — in which birds throughout England turn on the human population without warning or explanation — gave Hitchcock one of his greatest films. But du Maurier's original is more disturbing than the movie: the birds are never explained and the ending refuses resolution.
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by Daphne du Maurier
Dick Young, staying at his friend's house in Cornwall, takes an experimental drug that sends him back to fourteenth-century Cornwall — where he becomes obsessed with the lives of a long-dead woman and her circle.
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by Daphne du Maurier
Mary Yellan arrives at Jamaica Inn on the Cornish moors to live with her aunt, and finds a place of terror run by her brutal uncle Joss Merlyn, who is involved in wrecking ships on the coast for their cargo.
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by Daphne du Maurier
A bored aristocrat escapes her London life for the Cornwall coast, where she discovers a French pirate ship hidden in a creek and falls in love with its captain — du Maurier's most overtly romantic novel and a study of the desire for freedom.
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Daphne du Maurier's complete bibliography in order — from Rebecca and Jamaica Inn to My Cousin Rachel. Best starting points for new readers of this gothic master.
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Where to start with Daphne du Maurier — whether to begin with Rebecca, My Cousin Rachel, or Jamaica Inn. A complete reading guide to du Maurier's novels.
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Daphne du Maurier's unnamed narrator arrives at Manderley as the new Mrs. de Winter and finds herself haunted by the presence of her husband's dead first wife. These books share its Gothic atmosphere, unreliable interiority, and the feeling that a house itself knows something.
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