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Rebecca, published in 1938, brought its author instant international acclaim, capturing the popular imagination with its haunting atmosphere of suspense and mystery. But the more fame this and her other books encouraged, the more reclusive Daphne du Maurier became.

Margaret Forster’s award-winning biography could hardly be more worthy of its subject. Drawing on private letters and papers, and with the unflinching co-operation of Daphne du Maurier’s family, Margaret Forster explores the secret drama of her life – the stifling relationship with her father, actor-manager Gerald du Maurier; her troubled marriage to war hero and royal aide, ‘Boy’ Browning; her wartime love affair; her passion for Cornwall and her deep friendships with the last of her father’s actress loves, Gertrude Lawrence, and with an aristocratic American woman.

Most significant of all, Margaret Forster ingeniously strips away the relaxed and charming facade to lay bare the true workings of a complex and emotional character whose passionate and often violent stories mirrored her own fantasy life more than anyone could ever have imagined.

About the Author

Born in Carlisle, Margaret Forster is the author of many successful novels – including Lady’s Maid, Have the Men Had Enough?, The Memory Box, Diary of an Ordinary Woman, Keeping the World Away, and most recently Over – as well as bestselling memoirs, and biographies of Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Daphne du Maurier. She is married to writer and journalist Hunter Davies and lives in London and the Lake District.

Also by Margaret Forster

FICTION

NON-FICTION

POETRY

Daphne du Maurier

Margaret Forster

For Joyce Blake (who first aroused my interest in biography) and in memory of Phyllis Wynne (who first aroused my interest in the novels of Daphne du Maurier).

List of Illustrations

14. Daphne’s friends in Cornwall: Foy Quiller-Couch, (Enone Rashleigh, and others (Courtesy of G. Symondson)

18. Daphne walking in the Menabilly woods with her children (Life Magazine, Time & Life Ltd)

27. Daphne with her two daughters in the mid 1960s. (© Tom L. Blau, Camera Press)

28. Olive White before her marriage to Kits Browning (and inset with him later).

29. Daphne playing cricket with her grandson Rupert. (© Tom L. Blau, Camera Press)

Every attempt has been made to trace sources of photographs but in some cases this has proved impossible. Where sources are not credited above, photographs have been supplied by the Browning family and are reproduced with their kind permission.

Acknowledgements

Since Daphne du Maurier’s letters and papers are all in private hands, with the exception of a small collection of some correspondence with her publisher Victor Gollancz during the fifties (which is in the Modern Records Centre, University of Warwick), these acknowledgements also act as source material notes.

The full co-operation of Daphne du Maurier’s children has been essential. Between them they possess documentation for the whole of their mother’s life, including her letters from the age of five, and also letters of Gerald du Maurier’s, together with many covering the life of their father Lt.-Gen. Browning. Apart from those letters written to each of them by their mother, they hold letters to Maud Waddell (Tod), Daphne’s governess; to Mlle Fernande Yvon; to her mother Lady du Maurier; to her sister-in-law Grace Browning; and to Augustus and Ina Agar.

There are also important collections of letters belonging to people outside the family, and I am grateful for access to them. For access to the correspondence between Daphne du Maurier and Ellen Doubleday special thanks to the latter’s daughter, Ellen M. Violett, Curator of the Ellen Doubleday Collection (Princeton University); thanks to Guy Symondson for letters to his mother’s cousin Foy Quiller-Couch; Garth Lean for his own letters from Daphne, covering the MRA years; Michael Thornton for his own letters; and John Williams for letters to his mother Evie Williams, Gertrude Lawrence’s secretary in England.

Other people who have kindly shared their letters from Daphne, and often their personal memories, with me are Bunny Austin, Henrietta Stapleton-Bretherton, Elizabeth Divine, Antonia Fraser, Bridget Graham, Doe Howard, Cynthia Millar, Lord Montgomery, John Prescott (to his mother Karen Prescott), Œnone Richardson (neé Rashleigh), Laila Spence (to her late husband Kenneth), Dorothy Sheppard, Douglas Symington (to his father J. A. Symington), Ellen M. Violett and Lady Wolfenden.

Daphne du Maurier’s publishers Victor Gollancz Ltd have generously allowed me to study their extensive files, and I thank Livia Gollancz and Stephen Bray for this permission. Curtis Brown Ltd, Daphne’s agent for virtually the whole of her career, have also allowed me access to their files, and I thank Anthea Morton-Saner for arranging this. Jane Holah, Group Librarian of the Octopus Publishing Group, has kindly supplied me with publication details, from the Heinemann files, of Daphne’s first three novels.

Apart from these letters I have learned a great deal of importance in conversation with members of the du Maurier and Browning families and with Daphne du Maurier’s friends and those who worked for her. Angela and Jeanne du Maurier have helped me with early memories, and Daphne’s grandchildren with more recent ones. But it is to her three children, Tessa (Lady Montgomery), Flavia (Lady Leng) and Kits (Christian Browning), that I am most indebted. They have spent many hours answering questions and have provided me with introductions to people in their mother’s life whom it would have been otherwise quite impossible for me to track down. Their role has not been an easy one. I have exposed events in their mother’s life which were unknown to them and which have proved painful for them to discover. But they know that their mother believed that if biographies are written – and she never at any time banned a biography about herself, once she was dead, though she had a great aversion to any during her lifetime – they should try to tell what she called ‘all truth’. What she detested were biographies that were ‘stereo-typed, dull-as-ditchwater, or very fulsome praising’. She realized the truth was ‘often hard for the family to take’, but saw no point in biography otherwise.^fn1 The particular truths revealed in this biography have been hard for her own family to take, but they have stayed loyal to their mother’s directive, and taken them.

I am grateful to the following people who have given me so much of their time to talk about Daphne and about her husband: Michael Williams, Sheila Bush, Liz Calder, Lord Carrington, Maj.-Gen. C. M. F. Deakin, Lady Donaldson, Margaret Eglesfield, Richard Elsden, Rena M. Fairley (who talked to me about her cousin Maud Waddell), Mary Fox, Patricia Frere, Joanna Goldsworthy, Giles Gordon, Anne Griffiths, Brian and Pauline Johnston, John Knight, Garth and Margo Lean, Dr Martin Luther, Oriel Malet, Lord Montgomery, Margaret Netherton, Mike Parker, Janet Puxley (who talked to me about her late husband’s family and the background to Hungry Hill), Gladys Powell, Veronica Rashleigh, Margaret Robertson, A. L. Rowse, Elizabeth Spillane, Guy and Kate Symondson, Alastair Tower, Mary Varcoe, Ellen M. Violett, Sir Brian Warren, Major (retd) S. Weaver and Noël Welch.

Others who answered questions by letter are H.R.H. Prince Philip; Canon Denys and Mr Hubert Browning (from New Zealand); and Terry Jones (from Canada); George Bott, Lavinia Greacen, Ian Hamilton, Patricia Hastings, Ken McCormick, Sir Oliver Millar, the late Matthew Norgate, John Reece, Mrs Milton Runyon, Michael Thornton, Michael Trinick, Nicholas Wapshott and Oscar Yerburgh.

I thank the following people for permission to look round the houses where Daphne du Maurier lived: Angela Hodges (Cumberland Terrace, Regents Park); Jane Simpson (Cannon Hall); Angela du Maurier (Ferryside); Veronica Rashleigh (Menabilly and Kilmarth).

Special mention should be made of Esther Rowe, Daphne’s housekeeper for thirty-one years, who has been unstinting in her help both by letter and in interviews.

Daphne du Maurier’s literary executors are her son Kits, and Monty Baker-Munton, husband of Maureen Luschwitz, General Browning’s Staff Officer (PA), who returned with him in 1946. Daphne had implicit trust in Monty and involved him in her business affairs from 1960 onwards. Both he and Maureen became close friends and were depended upon to a great extent. I am deeply indebted to both of them for the time and trouble they have taken to assist me.

Finally, I would like to say how much it has mattered to me to have an agent, a publisher, an editor and a typist all as enthusiastic about a project as mine have been. Tessa Sayle, Carmen Callil, Alison Samuel and Gertrud Watson have shown a curiosity about, and interest in, the life of Daphne du Maurier which has very nearly matched my own and has been far beyond the call of any duty. It has greatly added to the pleasure of writing this book.

PART ONE

The Golden Girl
1907–1932

Chapter One

SHEET-LIGHTNING SPLIT THE sky over London on the evening of 12 May 1907 and thunder rumbled long into the night. All day it had been hot and sultry, the trees in Regent’s Park barely moving and a heat haze obscuring the new growth of leaves. Then, towards dawn the next day, the weather began to change. A wind picked up and by afternoon the rain had begun, light at first, but by 5.20, when Muriel du Maurier gave birth to her second daughter, heavy and persistent, bringing with it the relief of much cooler weather. The theatres, which had played to poor audiences because of the heat, were once more almost full. Marie Tempest starred in The Truth at the Comedy, Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree in Julius Caesar at Her Majesty’s, and at the Hicks Theatre in Shaftesbury Avenue Gerald du Maurier was scoring an immense success, the night his new daughter was born, in a light comedy entitled Brewster’s Millions.

But his success, in the kind of part which had made his name, had begun to bore him. Gerald’s whole life was the theatre, in which he had always seemed extremely happy and confident, but during the last few years he had decided that he had come to hate both acting and the theatre itself. In July 1906, while his wife Muriel was staying on the Isle of Wight with her two-year-old first child Angela, Gerald confided in a letter that he ‘loathed acting and actors’. He longed to join his little family on holiday and could hardly bear to be without them – ‘I hate living alone . . . it is dreadful waking up and no blessed angel.’ He could never sleep when his wife was away – ‘I thought I would be a good boy last night, so I had a mug of cocoa and went to bed early. Never again. I slept for five minutes between four and five . . .’ He thought of Muriel all the time, swimming and sunbathing, concerned that she might be ‘getting brown – don’t you go and overdo it – I love you most looking fragile’. She was, he wrote, ‘the only real thing in this world and I get a sort of pain in my heart when you’re not near’. This pain made him reluctant to allow even the briefest of separations, and every reunion was ecstatic. When he joined Muriel in August 1906 he wrote he would ‘faint when I see you’, so overwhelming was his passion. The thought of this love ever fading made him feverish – ‘I only pray from my soul that I may make you always happy and keep your wonderful love to the end.’

Supremely conscious that he had at last been fortunate, after two ill-fated liaisons,¹ he was always anxious that Muriel should know she was appreciated. ‘Muriel, I love you,’ he had written when they married in 1903. ‘It is a splendid thing that has happened to us both, dearest, and I do hope the Great Spirit will bless us. It’s by our truth, loyalty and devotion to each other that we shall accomplish a beautiful life and with such love as we have for each other, dear dear Muriel, it should not be difficult . . . I seem to love you in all ways, as a child, as a boy, as a grown man – simply, passionately and sensibly, and with it all there is a sweet sense of security.’

The most telling phrase of all was Gerald’s longing for ‘a sweet sense of security’, so vital to his well-being. His upbringing as the youngest of the five children of George and Emma du Maurier had been utterly secure, but suddenly, in April of this very year, 1907, fate had dealt the first of several blows to the du Maurier family. Arthur Llewelyn Davies,² husband of Sylvia, Gerald’s second eldest sister, had died, after months of agony, of cancer of the jaw. The anguish of this death, and Sylvia’s grief, had obliged Gerald to be more of a ‘grown man’ than the boy he preferred still to think himself.

He was thirty-four years old when this tragedy happened, but until then had always managed to go through life in an entirely light-hearted way, his mother’s ‘ewe lamb’, everyone’s favourite. He was Gerald the joker, Gerald the debonair, Gerald the charmer, a man who had been spared responsibility in life and had always taken advantage of this. But with Arthur’s death, Sylvia’s misery and the pathos of five young nephews left fatherless, Gerald had just begun to see the world differently. His own new-found happiness was threatened by the evidence of what had happened to Arthur, and when, in 1910, Sylvia herself also died of breast cancer, he discovered it was not, after all, going to be so easy to preserve the ‘beautiful life’ he had promised Muriel. Golden lads and lasses also came to dust, and rather sooner, and much more terrifyingly, than he had ever imagined.

So Daphne du Maurier was born at a time when her father’s personality had begun to change. This manifested itself in small ways at first – sudden, brief moments of ‘moodiness’, as it was called – then more markedly. Gerald could now seem uncharacteristically ‘low’ for days at a time, when he was not actually on the stage, and he would sometimes openly sigh and confess he felt unhappy, but so lugubrious was his expression that his family were convinced he was being intentionally funny. After all, what did he have to be depressed about? He was successful in his work, happy in his home life at 24 Cumberland Terrace, Regent’s Park, where Daphne was born. Up to the outbreak of the First World War in 1914, Gerald was leaping ahead, moving from being primarily an actor to being an actor-manager, who shared in the profits. He went into partnership with Frank Curzon and stamped his mark on their productions at Wyndham’s Theatre. There was nothing at all for him to worry about.

And yet Gerald did worry. He worried about what he was doing with his own life, where he thought he was going, now that middle age was in sight. He was a highly successful actor, credited with developing a new naturalistic style of acting, but he doubted the value of this. There was a restlessness in him and a desire for greater things, which few guessed at – he seemed, outwardly, so buoyant and optimistic. There was a yearning in him to which he could give no name and which he covered over with apparently inexhaustible high spirits, only to feel a sense of despair about himself because he could not be more serious. When tragedies like his brother-in-law Arthur’s death happened he was more than normally overwhelmed with their pointlessness and cruelty. Lacking any religious beliefs, he had no answers to the questions with which he plagued himself – what was the meaning of his life, was death the end, was there any point to it all? Silence, emptiness, being on his own were a horror to him and made him panic – he wanted always to be busy and surrounded by people so that he would not have to think. Fortunately, his wife Muriel appreciated this and worked hard at ensuring Gerald’s ‘boredom’ was kept at bay. She was a superb organizer, easily able to entertain the hordes of people her husband needed about him to distract and occupy him. An actress herself – Gerald had met her in a production of J. M. Barrie’s The Admirable Crichton in 1902 – she gave up the stage, without appearing to regret it, before the birth of her third daughter, Jeanne, in 1911, and devoted herself to running Gerald’s life. On the surface, she was successful. As a hostess she excelled, never appearing to weary of providing Gerald with the endless social gatherings which he required. He was put first at all times. Even her mother-in-law, to whom Gerald, as the youngest of her five children, had always seemed most precious, was satisfied with Muriel’s devotion.

But Muriel was by no means the cipher this exaggerated respect for Gerald’s needs might suggest, nor was her own family insignificant beside the du Mauriers. She was named after her maternal great-grandfather, Charles Muriel Bidwell, whose son founded a prestigious firm of chartered surveyors in Cambridge. Her father, Harry Beaumont, came from an East Anglian family of lawyers. He himself was a solicitor whose practice ran into difficulties after he had moved from Cambridge to Battersea. It was unusual for a young woman of Muriel Beaumont’s background to go on the stage at the turn of the century, but nobody meeting her ever doubted her refinement and she was admired for seeking to earn her own income and contribute towards her family’s. She had a brother, Willie, who was a literary agent and journalist, and a sister, Sybil, known as ‘Billie’, who was a secretary. All three Beaumont children showed some strength of character in the ways in which they reacted to their father’s comparative ill-fortune, and they shared a familial devotion equal to that of the du Mauriers. Gerald, visiting Muriel’s home before they were married, was instantly impressed by the warmth of the Beaumont family life and by the sweetness of her parents.

For a decade, Muriel, known as ‘Mo’, gave Gerald what he needed: stability, adoration, the comforts of a well-run home. But as he became more dissatisfied with himself Gerald began to grow restless. He could not do without Mo, still loved her, but he felt a new lack. What Mo could not respond to was the mercurial side of Gerald’s character, the side of him which was quick, a touch wicked, even a little crazy. Mo was sensible, calm and, although always charming, never original or challenging. Gerald loved to talk, to tell stories, to indulge in repartee, delighting in responses quicker than his own, loving the excitement of risqué raconteurs whom he would dare to go further. All of this was beyond Mo. She was the centre of Gerald’s life, but increasingly he liked to travel away from it, though ever dependent on knowing it was there to return to. His affairs with young actresses were known to her – they were known to everyone in their theatrical circle – but she seemed to cope with this knowledge by appearing to ignore it. The image of Gerald and Mo as utterly devoted was not the façade this attitude might suggest – they were devoted but sexual fidelity on Gerald’s part was not essential to the devotion. So long as Mo was not publicly humiliated, so long as she knew no other woman could ever claim a place in her husband’s heart, then she tolerated his transgressions. But to deduce from this that she was a weak character would be wrong. On the contrary, she was in her own way strong, even formidable, possessing great dignity and always impressing with the authority with which she ran her home. Gerald seemed to depend on her a great deal, especially returning late from the theatre when the two of them would sit talking while he wound down from whatever part he had been playing. Gerald was a family man, a husband and a father above all else, whatever the impression others received.

When Angela, Daphne and Jeanne du Maurier were young they thought their father was perfect. Their childhood memories enshrined a father so caring and affectionate, so energetic and jolly, so inventive and enthusiastic and so overwhelmingly protective that they were sure there could be no other like him. The sun rose and set with Gerald – his world was made their world, a world of action, a world of living in great comfort among colourful people, a world of the theatre. Their own little nursery world on the top floor of the Cumberland Terrace house might be staid and traditional, but downstairs was the ever-thrilling presence of Gerald, who would swoop and enfold them and draw them into his own exciting existence. He played marvellous imaginative games³ with them, read to them, took them with him to the theatre, involved himself in their lives totally when he was with them, and they saw themselves blessed with such a father. As indeed, until adolescence, they were.

In an era when fathers were by no means common in the nursery, and certainly not fun-loving figures when they did put in an appearance, Gerald du Maurier stood out. He gave time to his daughters, and saw to it that this time was rich. Above all, he spent hours talking to them, not in a patronizing way, but treating them, if not as equals, at least as people whose words were worthy of serious consideration on any topic. Gradually, as the three girls grew up, it was the talk which fascinated them most. Their mother was not part of it. She would withdraw and let Gerald and the girls converse, never quite sure what enthralled them so, though she understood the language perfectly well. This language was full of du Maurier code words, impenetrable to an outsider, code words which changed and were added to all the time and gave to any discussion a delicious sense of secrecy. To outsiders, it could sound affected and even downright silly and annoying, but just as the English upper classes of the era loved to have their own private language, which excluded anyone not belonging to the magic circle, so the du Mauriers loved having theirs. For the girls it was all an extension of the theatre: they acted in real life just as Gerald acted on stage, and the code words were like scripts which must be perfectly learned. It made them feel quite triumphant to be able to communicate in public, as well as private, in a language no one else could exactly penetrate. Some of this language was easy to understand: to refer to someone being ‘on a hard chair’ meant they were easily offended, being ‘menaced’ was being attracted by another person (and ‘a fearful menace’ was a very attractive person), while indulging in a ‘tell-him’ was to be boring. But it was harder to trace the derivation of others: ‘wain’, for example, was to be embarrassed, but nobody could remember why. Usually, some incident in family life had given rise to a code word and then the incident itself was often forgotten. It was the same with names. The girls themselves had different nicknames, religiously adhered to for a while, then suddenly changed when a better one presented itself. New people coming into the family circle were invariably given nicknames, until it seemed no one ever had their proper name or spoke in plain English.

The girls loved it and entered into the spirit of it quite naturally. They were encouraged, even expected, to use their imaginations, to make their conversation as amusing and colourful as possible. What was rather more dangerous was the way in which they were also pulled into Gerald’s own style of mockery. Mockery was his favourite weapon and he used it mercilessly. Everything and everyone could be mocked and not to enjoy this sport was to have no sense of humour. Yet at the same time – which was confusing for children – good manners were essential. Gerald could mock someone until they seemed completely ridiculous, but should that person later appear they had to be treated with absolute respect with never a hint of what had gone before. So the children learned very early that nothing was ever what it seemed – a kind of complicated double standard was operated by their beloved father both on and off the stage.

Gerald himself saw no contradictions in his role as father. He openly loved his daughters – he was very affectionate, carrying them round long after they had outgrown this stage, and cuddling them all in the most demonstrative way – and felt he inculcated in them the highest values and standards. The most important of values was family pride. As he grew older, Gerald loved and revered his family more and more and talked endlessly about its history, both recent and long past, to his children. In 1916, when he purchased Cannon Hall, Cannon Place in Hampstead, the return to the area where he had been born⁴ reinforced his passion for tales of his father, the artist and novelist George du Maurier, and every walk from their new home became for the girls a lesson in family history. Gerald was extremely proud of his father, of his ability both as an artist (he illustrated the work of Hardy and Henry James as well as being a famous Punch cartoonist) and as a writer. The three novels his father had written – Peter Ibbetson, Trilby (introducing Svengali), and The Martians – were adored by Gerald and he never tired of talking of them. The girls listened dutifully but at that stage were rather bored by all this emphasis on the past. Family meant to them, as to all children, those who were alive and who featured in their everyday existence. Grandparents came first and contrasted strongly with one another. Their paternal grandfather, about whom they heard so much, was dead, but their paternal grandmother, Emma du Maurier, was alive and a touch formidable. The girls called her ‘Big Granny’, because she was tall and majestic. They had lunch with her at her flat in Portman Mansions once a week, but, although she was always kind to them, they were in awe of her black clothes and the little lace cap on her head. Visits to her were formal and a little tense, whereas those to their maternal grandparents were quite the opposite.

By the time Gerald had moved his family to Hampstead, the Beaumonts had also moved to nearby Golders Green, so convenient for grandchildren to visit. Daphne in particular loved to go and stay the weekend at 45 Woodstock Avenue, where everything was so humble, quite markedly different from the splendours of Cannon Hall. This was a large Queen Anne house, only a hundred yards from Hampstead Heath, with a small courtyard in front and an enormous walled garden at the back from which there were magnificent views over the whole of London. The house was imposing but not austere, pleasantly rambling in character, though rather formally decorated and furnished by Muriel. Part of the attraction of the tiny Woodstock Avenue house where Daphne’s maternal grandparents lived was its ordinariness. It was one in a row of new semi-detached houses, with the railway line running along nearby, and seemed like part of Toytown with everything on a small scale. Daphne liked, too, her grandparents’ routine, such a contrast to the excitement and glamour which so often filled Cannon Hall. Her grandfather did little except potter about and listen to the wireless while her grandmother baked and sewed and shopped in Golders Green High Street without the help of any of the servants needed to run Cannon Hall.⁵ Daphne liked to go shopping with her for everyday necessities and was curiously content to play on her own in the tiny back garden and sleep on a camp-bed in her Aunt Billie’s room.

But then Daphne, alone of the three du Maurier girls, had a fascination with lives different from her own. She had a great rapport with the Cannon Hall servants and her curiosity amused them. Dorothy Sheppard, who started work as a between-maid soon after the du Mauriers bought Cannon Hall, was rather startled by Daphne’s eager interest in her. Only sixteen herself, Dorothy came straight from her home in a village near Sandringham to the imposing Hampstead house, half-terrified by the prospect. But within a week she was counting herself lucky and had decided she could not have landed anywhere better. Not only did she like all the other five servants, but she thought the family ‘lovely’, especially ten-year-old Daphne. Dorothy slept in the night nursery with Daphne and six-year-old Jeanne, and was from the first plagued with questions about her family, her home, her village, about how she felt, was she lonely? . . . Daphne could hardly wait for the light to be put out before subjecting Dorothy to an inquisition. Once Dor, as she was known, had begun walking out with Jack, the boy who brought the fish from Nockles, the questioning became more searching: did Jack hold Dor’s hand, did he kiss her, and if he did what did it feel like and what was going to happen next? This was the same child who shrank from facing visitors, who had to be persuaded to talk to them, who seemed always ill at ease in company, but then that was precisely the difference: with Dor, with her Beaumont grandparents, Daphne did not need to perform. She did not feel she was being examined and scrutinized, her remarks analysed and pronounced upon so disconcertingly. To these people she was able to be herself without worrying about being found wanting or thought curious: they sensed nothing strange about her. But to those many others who visited Cannon Hall, particularly the theatrical crowd, she did seem ‘odd’. Clever, yes. Pretty, certainly. Talented, possibly. But silent, watchful and, most peculiar of all in that household, shy.

It was the kind of shyness most frequently misunderstood, especially by Gerald’s friends. If young Daphne had blushed and trembled and looked appealingly nervous then she would have caused no comment, but instead her shyness came out as haughtiness, her chin held aggressively in the air, her mouth set, and she would glare and toss her head with what was mistaken as defiance. Her eyes, which were a startlingly clear blue, were beautiful, but they were apt to appear hostile and when she looked away, as she frequently did through embarrassment, she could seem sly. The contrast with her sisters was marked. Angela was direct and extremely sociable, and Jeanne, the baby, although also quite shy, was used to being petted and cooed over. Taken to their father’s dressing-room at the theatre, as they so often were, Angela was in her element, Jeanne happy to accept attention, but Daphne hated it. Gerald’s dressing-room was always full, she felt, of ‘gushing fools’ whom even as a child she despised. It needed only one voice to cry ‘Oh, the darlings’ to freeze her with horror. She would be struck dumb backstage, hating the atmosphere there as much as she loved it front-of-house. She found herself suddenly clumsy, knocking things over and behaving in general like some Lower School boy.⁶

She wished often that she was a boy, not only because, like so many young girls throughout the ages, she envied the greater freedom and opportunities of a boy’s life, but because she and her sisters were well aware how passionately their father had longed for a son to carry on the du Maurier name. Gerald’s obsession with family grew stronger with every year, and after his only brother, Guy, was killed in action in 1915, leaving no children, he knew he was the last of the male line.⁷ He did not in the least regard his daughters as being of the ‘wrong’ sex – daughters were the thing – but, like his parents, he would have liked two sons as well as three daughters. After the birth of Jeanne, his disappointment developed and, since this in no way affected his love for his girls, he was able to be perfectly open about it. All three daughters wished their beloved father could have had a son to make him happy, and Daphne wished it most of all. She was the one most like Gerald himself and could imagine herself as the boy he had been. She did not look like him, but relatives noticed not only that she walked and moved in the way Gerald did but that she shared his quick thinking. There was an empathy between the two of them which was quite unmistakable.

This was certainly something Gerald acknowledged himself. He wrote a poem to her:⁸

My very slender one

So brave of heart, but delicate of will,

So careful not to wound, never kill,

My tender one –

Who seems to live in Kingdoms all her own

In realms of joy

Where heroes young and old

In climates hot and cold

Do deeds of daring and much fame

And she knows she could do the same

If only she’d been born a boy.

And sometimes in the silence of the night

I wake and think perhaps my darling’s right

And that she should have been,

And, if I’d had my way,

She would have been, a boy.

My very slender one

So feminine and fair, so fresh and sweet,

So full of fun and womanly deceit.

My tender one

Who seems to dream her life away alone.

A dainty girl

But always well attired

And loves to be admired

Wherever she may be, and wants

To be the being who enchants

Because she has been born a girl.

And sometimes in the turmoil of the day

I pause, and think my darling may

Be one of those who will

For good or ill

Remain a girl for ever and be still

A Girl.

It was a confused message for a girl to interpret: on the one hand her father seemed to be expressing strong regret that she was not a boy, and to be telling her she was more suited to being a boy than a girl, and on the other to be rejoicing in her femininity, so long as she never grew up. In her own mind Daphne had no doubts: everything about being a boy appealed to her more. She hated dressing as a girl while she was growing up and most of the time did not do so. She and Jeanne wore boys’ shorts and shirts and ties and thick schoolboy socks and shoes – they liked to dress exactly as boys in an era when young girls did not wear trousers. She hated having her hair put in ringlets and having it endlessly brushed and was quick to adopt a short bob as soon as she had any choice. Her alter ego, ‘Eric Avon’,⁹ in whom she believed implicitly, went to Rugby and was bold and fearless and did all the things she would have done if she had been a boy. In a family where flights of fancy, and fantasy, were positively encouraged, there was no objection to Daphne’s passion for all things masculine. But the truth was that even clad in the most boyish of clothes and doing the most boyish of things Daphne looked indisputably and very fetchingly feminine. She was always a little girl playing at being a boy with no confusion whatsoever possible in the eye of any beholder. It was all rather charming and nobody was disturbed, nobody realized quite how much Daphne genuinely hated being a girl.

What her family also did not realize, and this was much more serious, was that Daphne actually convinced herself she was a boy. Her outward form was a mistake: inside, she was a boy, with a boy’s mind and heart and ambitions.¹⁰ Everything she did, she did as she judged a boy would do. This made the onset of puberty at twelve absolutely devastating for her. It was for the first time impossible for her to be a boy once menstruation had begun. The shock was profound and she took a long time to recover. She hated her periods – given the code name ‘Robert’ – and saw them as signifying ‘the end of being boyish’. The level of her distress was so acute that she retreated even more into her fantasy world, the one place she was truly happy. The only person who recognized how fiercely Daphne resented her own gender was her governess, Miss Maud Waddell, who came into the du Maurier household in 1918 when Daphne was eleven. Maud was a Cumbrian, born at Head’s Nook near Carlisle in 1887, and was as far from being a timid, subservient governess figure as it was possible to be. She came from a comfortably off family, of some standing in the area where they lived, and had been well educated at the Carlisle and County High School for Girls. Maud had a great desire to travel and after a brief spell teaching took herself off to Paris where she suddenly decided to train as a milliner. She served her apprenticeship with a Madame Paulette and then, with equal suddenness, went to Australia to visit her sister Winifred who had emigrated. But Maud disliked Australia and returned to England where she found lodgings in Hampstead and a job as governess to the du Maurier girls.

Daphne was from the beginning greatly intrigued by the new governess, who quickly, du Maurier fashion, became known as ‘Tod’.¹¹ Tod was a strong character who talked a lot and had decided opinions. Since she had never been trained as a teacher her methods were a little haphazard, but she was a naturally disciplined person and very firm with her pupils. She was appalled by Daphne’s handwriting and particularly by her spelling – both gave her sleepless nights – but impressed by her wide reading. The best thing about Tod, from Daphne’s point of view, was her love of literature and her ability to feed her with the right books at the right time. They read Browning together and Keats and Shelley and then moved on to more difficult poets – Donne, Dryden, Swinburne. Tod was very much the teacher, with no taste for familiarity, but this was what appealed to her young pupil. Daphne hated people who were anxious to curry favour or who showed too great a desire to be friendly. She preferred those who were clearly independent and could not care less whether they were going to be liked, were even a touch aloof and critical. Tod’s direct, confident manner, and the fact that she had been fairly adventurous in her thirty-one years, were all marks in her favour and within a very short time Daphne was devoted to her. The age gap of twenty years was immense, but then a younger governess would have lacked the authority Daphne craved.

The relationship with Tod was the first, outside family relationships, which Daphne developed and it was very important to her. The letters she wrote to Tod from family holidays were confessional in nature, revealing a great need to express herself to someone she could trust and who understood her. From Birchington-on-Sea, where the joint du Maurier and Freddy Lonsdale¹² families holidayed when she was thirteen, Daphne wrote to Tod of how she had been unable to bear being part of a big gang and had gone off on her own for long walks, which had led to scoldings, because she was presumed lost. She felt restless and discontented and did not even have a good book to console her. She’d been reduced to a ‘soppy book’ from which she quoted a sentence to show her disgust at ‘romantic slush’ (‘One glimpse only had she of his eyes and it was as if she was looking into the deep, deep heart of the fire unquenchable’). She longed to be off on a European Grand Tour just with Tod – ‘we would live in a Bohemian way (baths, of course), talk French and you’d do a lot of painting.¹³ I think I should take up writing or poetry!! Life might be romantic in Rome.’ It was certainly far from romantic in Birchington-on-Sea, where the popular playwright Freddy Lonsdale and Gerald played energetic games and forced their daughters to compete with each other. ‘Life is a curious problem’, wrote Daphne soulfully to Tod, ‘and always will be. One is so selfish about one’s own happiness . . . I have become an idealist, realism is so earthy and sometimes sordid – very often in fact.’

From another holiday venue Daphne wrote to Tod, feeling even more disillusioned: ‘You don’t know how I long to have a good talk with you and pour everything out. I never tell anyone anything and there is no one to talk to. I must be an awful rotter, as we have a ripping time always and no kids could be more indulged and made more fuss of, yet I long for something so terribly and I don’t know what it is. The feeling is always there and I don’t think I shall ever find it. It is no good telling the others things like that, they would only laugh . . . everyone thinks I am moody and tiresome . . . I really don’t know why I feel like this. People say I am acid and bitter . . . it’s terrible at my age to get bored with life.’ She was echoing her father’s restlessness without realizing it and, since she was so extremely sensitive to his moods, it is always possible she was reflecting them and not simply suffering from teenage Angst. What made these feelings worse was that Angela never seemed to suffer from them. Angela adored the ‘ripping time’, lapped up the travelling and parties, and was enjoying the crushes she had, usually on actors. Daphne was disapproving of these – ‘Angela’s got a crush on Ronald Pertwee,’ she told Tod, ‘she is quite hopeless over crushes.’

Daphne herself was wary of crushes. She permitted herself ‘a sort of crush’ on Ivor Novello, whom she and Angela had met backstage after a performance of Betrothal, but her only real admiration was reserved for Gladys Cooper. It was often remarked that Daphne bore a startling resemblance to Gladys, and encouraged by this she used to ‘work up in my mind that I was her daughter, smuggled at birth into Mummy’s care (except that Mummy would never have stood for it)’.¹⁴ But it was the done thing to have a crush on some male actor, so for a while she fixed on Basil Rathbone until the development of a genuine crush wiped him from her memory. This crush, when it hit her, was something more serious.

When Daphne was fourteen and on another family holiday she was suddenly and violently attracted to her thirty-six-year-old cousin Geoffrey Millar, who had joined the du Mauriers, together with his second wife. Geoffrey held her hand and she felt, for the first time, a physical thrill which she identified immediately as quite different from any feeling she had had before – dangerous, exciting, having little to do with schoolgirl crushes. What disturbed her most was the confusion between the physical and the emotional: she felt towards Geoffrey something like and yet quite different from what she felt towards her father. Her reaction was to be both elated but also a little frightened. For a long time, as she had written to Tod more than once, she had been searching for something nameless and now she wondered if this was ‘it’, and if ‘it’ was love. But she was controlled and analytical in her response to Geoffrey, and most alert to the effect his attentions to her had on Gerald. Even before this holiday she had noted and seemed to relish her father’s agitation if she appeared attracted to any man or boy. Once, on holiday in Dieppe, she wrote to Tod that there had been ‘a young French officer, who I see on the front every day . . . Daddy thinks he is an awful bounder and I pretend I like him very much just to annoy him’.

In the case of his nephew Geoffrey Millar, Gerald had every right to be alarmed. Geoffrey had a reputation, established in his own adolescence, for being dangerously attractive to women and taking great advantage of this. He treated his women badly once he had lost interest in them and, though his charm and good looks made him popular, everyone in the family was well aware how far he could go. Gerald, knowing of his history, watched him not as he had watched the harmless French sailor, but with real dread. It was no good assuring himself that Geoffrey would surely never even think of seducing young Daphne: nobody could be sure what Geoffrey would or would not be capable of. Nor, for that matter, could anyone know how Daphne herself would respond. She had a great desire to be daring, as Gerald knew, and might, at her tender age, prove more susceptible to the kind of flattery, not to mention expertise, Geoffrey could subtly employ. Both of them had a streak of wildness in them, shared the ‘devil’ that Gerald knew to be in himself. The potential for catastrophe was there. ‘I am feeling rather depressed at the moment,’ Daphne wrote to Tod, ‘I am always having rows with the parents. The latest is about Geoffrey . . . Daddy overhears certain conversations, the rest I leave to your imagination.’ When Geoffrey left to return to London, Gerald was vastly relieved, not knowing that Dorothy Sheppard, the maid, carried notes between Daphne and Geoffrey when she made the journey backwards and forwards from Cannon Hall during the holidays. Once Geoffrey had gone, Daphne turned to Swinburne’s poetry for consolation and found a verse in The Garden of Prosperine which summed up what she felt (it begins: ‘I’m tired of tears . . .’). It was, she wrote to Tod, ‘foul’ for a girl her age to be in such a state.

Her sexual awakening – and that is what it was, even though Geoffrey had only held her hand – left her more dissatisfied with life than ever. ‘The future’, she announced to Tod, ‘is always such a complete blank. There is nothing ahead that lures me terribly . . . If only I was a man.’ And yet even as she wrote this, she wondered why on earth she wanted to be a man when ‘I like women much better than men’. She was coming to the conclusion nevertheless that ‘I may as well run the race with the rest of the pack instead of being a damned solitary hound missing the game’. But ‘the game’ itself she was beginning to believe was primarily about sex, and playing this game with a vengeance was her own father. Sex, she now knew, did not take place only within marriage, but she was not sure whether it had anything to do with love either. ‘Daddy says love is the only thing worth while,’ she wrote to Tod, ‘real, ceaseless love. I don’t know.’ For years she and her sisters had heard Gerald mock those young actresses who made up his ‘stable’, and though it had always seemed such fun she was, at almost fifteen, less sure. She watched Gerald carefully – became ‘beady’, in du Maurier code – noting his flirtatious behaviour and her mother’s apparent indifference, and wondered. ‘Father has been playing golf with Eileen,’ she told Tod, adding, ‘she likes him, doesn’t she?’ She set Gerald little tests and reported to Tod the result. One arose from reading Somerset Maugham’s volume of short stories, The Trembling of a Leaf, especially one story, ‘Rain’. This is the story about a missionary who reforms and converts a prostitute only to succumb to her himself. ‘It had’, wrote Daphne, ‘finished men forever in my eyes,’ but she gave it to Gerald to read and invited his comments. Predictably Gerald was ‘horrified . . . said it was terribly pas pour les jeunes filles’. Daphne agreed it was ‘foul’. What she thought foul was the missionary’s lust, his inability to resist sex, and what she saw in her father’s life was the same inability to resist young actresses. If ‘the stable’ really was kept for sex, where did that leave love, and most of all where did it leave Mo?

About the Book

About the Author

Also by Margaret Forster

FICTION

NON-FICTION

POETRY

Daphne du Maurier

Margaret Forster

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgements

PART ONE

The Golden Girl
1907–1932

Chapter One

About the Book

About the Author

Also by Margaret Forster

FICTION

NON-FICTION

POETRY

Daphne du Maurier

Margaret Forster

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgements

PART ONE

The Golden Girl1907–1932

Chapter One

The Golden Girl
1907–1932