Daphne du Maurier
1 book analyzed
Biography
Daphne du Maurier (1907–1989) was born into a distinguished creative family — her father Gerald du Maurier was the most celebrated actor-manager of his era. She grew up between London and Cornwall, and Cornwall's landscape — its cliffs, its coves, its enclosed, secretive beauty — is inseparable from everything she wrote. She was bisexual, though she used the code term 'the boy in the box' for the part of herself she could not publicly acknowledge. She was famously uncomfortable with social performance, with the demands of being a public figure, with 'femininity' as a role. She married the soldier 'Boy' Browning and wrote Rebecca while managing the anxiety of his absence and her own sense of personal inadequacy. The novel is, among other things, a displaced autobiography of her fear that she was not enough.