Birth of Daphne Du Maurier

The first of the du Maurier dynasty to settle in England, in the 1860s, was George, who made his name as an artist for Punch and as the author of the novel Trilby, in which he created the character of Svengali. He often used his son, the future Sir Gerald du Maurier, as a model for drawings, sent him to Harrow and, with misgivings, helped him to begin a career on the stage.

Gerald turned out to be one of the most famous actors of his day. He made his name in plays by J.M. Barrie, including Peter Pan, and his sister Sylvia was the mother of the Lewellyn Davies boys, the models for the play’s ‘lost boys’. Gerald du Maurier later played both Raffles and Bulldog Drummond. He married an actress, Muriel Beaumont, in 1903 and they had three daughters – Angela, Daphne and Jeanne – the second of whom was born in some grandeur and after a violent thunderstorm at 24 Cumberland Terrace in Regent’s Park.

It was pelting with rain when the new arrival appeared, soon after 5pm. She started life in the nursery on the top floor of the Cumberland Terrace house. The dominating figure was her father, who took a huge interest and delight in his daughters. He cuddled them, played with them, read to them, took them to the theatre with him, taught them the family history and talked endlessly to and with them in a private language studded with family code words. ‘A fearful menace’, for instance, was someone extremely attractive, while for some reason no one could remember, ‘wain’ meant embarrassing. The girls loved their father intensely, but as Margaret Forster suggested in her definitive biography of Daphne, too intensely for their own good.

In 1916 the family moved to Cannon Hall in Hampstead, where Daphne struck outsiders as odd – shy, silent, curiously watchful, even hostile. Wishing she was a boy, because her father had always longed for one, she hated dressing as a girl, mostly wore boy’s clothes and convinced herself that inside she actually was a boy, which meant that puberty at the age of twelve was psychologically devastating. She was educated at home by governesses, read widely and wrote stories and poems, in which she was encouraged by her father, who hoped she would emulate her grandfather George. She later had a mixed heterosexual and lesbian love life, and would call her autobiography Growing Pains.

Daphne’s first published story came out in 1929 in a magazine called The Bystander, which was edited by her Uncle Willie, her father’s younger brother. An exceptionally gifted story-teller, she wrote novels and a biography of her father after his death in 1934 before scoring a big success with Jamaica Inn in 1936, followed by an even bigger one with Rebecca in 1938. Meantime she had a difficult marriage with an army officer, ‘Boy’ Browning, from 1932 to his death in 1965 and lived mostly reclusively in Cornwall until her own death in 1989, aged eighty-one.