Frenchman's Creek

Frenchman’s Creek Review

Daphne du Maurier wrote Frenchman’s Creek in 1941, during the London Blitz, and the circumstances of composition are not incidental to the novel. It is a fantasy of escape — specifically, the escape of a woman trapped by the expectations of her class and her marriage — written at a moment when London was being bombed nightly and the idea of escape, of a hidden creek and a pirate ship and a love affair unconstrained by convention, had an urgency it might not otherwise have possessed. Du Maurier understood what she was writing and made no apology for it: this is romance and adventure as conscious wish-fulfilment, and it is entirely accomplished on those terms.

Dona St Columb, a bored aristocrat married to a pleasant, ineffectual man, escapes the social round of Restoration London for Navron, the family estate in Cornwall, with her children and a skeleton staff. In the creek below the house she discovers a French pirate vessel and meets its captain — urbane, courageous, an artist who paints birds, a man who has apparently chosen the freedom of piracy over the constraints of any settled life. The affair that develops between them is rendered with the directness that du Maurier’s best romantic writing always had: she does not sentimentalise it or pretend its costs are small.

What elevates the novel above conventional historical romance is du Maurier’s honesty about what her protagonist wants and why. Dona does not simply want the French captain; she wants what he represents — the freedom to act rather than to be acted upon, to make choices that are genuinely her own rather than choices made within the narrow band that her class and gender permit. Cornwall, for du Maurier, is always the landscape where different rules apply: the moors and the coast are spaces where the civilised world’s categories temporarily dissolve, where a woman can shoot a pistol and sail a boat and choose a lover without the weight of London society pressing down on every decision.

The ending is honest rather than romantic in the escapist sense: du Maurier does not pretend that the fantasy is sustainable or that its costs are zero. Dona returns to her husband and children having had her summer of freedom, and the novel’s final pages acknowledge both what she is returning to and what she is choosing not to relinquish entirely. It is a more sophisticated treatment of the romance fantasy than its apparent lightness suggests — a novel that understands it is offering a dream and is honest enough to show the dreamer waking up.