Enchanted Cornwall: Her Pictoral Memoir by Daphne du Maurier

     If you've followed our blog, you may have gathered that I'm a huge fan of Daphne du Maurier - especially her novel Rebecca.  This book is a wonderful visual journey through the Cornish landscape that she so vividly paints in her novel.  But more than that, it is a chronicle of the part Cornwall has played in her life.  She says:

     I walked this land with a dreamer's freedom and with a waking man's perspective - places, houses whispered to me their secrets and shared with me their sorrows and their joys.  And in return I gave them something of myself, a few of my novels passing into the folk-lore of this ancient place.

     Written in her later years, the book looks back on her life from her childhood, to her early love of Cornwall, and the stories behind the novels she set there.  She uses passages from her many novels along with beautiful photographs of the areas that inspired each one.
     I enjoyed the stories of her childhood.  As the daughter of a British actor, she was raised on the world of make-believe and surrounded by her father's famous colleagues and friends.  She notes that after a visit from Basil Rathbone, there is a page in her diary on which she drew a heart pierced by an arrow and the words, "I love Basil."  Years later, he played the part of the wicked Lord Rockingham in the film version of her novel Frenchman's Creek.

   My favorite section of the book is when she writes about Menabilly, the house that inspired Rebecca.  The house was abandoned, the owner living elsewhere, and from the moment she set eyes upon it she was under its spell.  She began to write Rebecca in 1937 while her husband was stationed in Alexandria and she was homesick for Cornwall.

     This novel would not be a tale of smugglers and wreckers of the nineteenth century, like Jamaica Inn, but would be set in the present day, say the mid-twenties, and it would be about a young wife and her slightly older husband, living in a beautiful house that had been in his family for generations.  There were many such houses in Cornwall; my friend Foy Quiller-Couch, with whom I visited Jamaica Inn, had taken me to some of them.  Houses with extensive grounds, with woods, near to the sea, with family portraits on the walls...my Cornish house would be empty, neglected, its owners absent...very like Menabilly near Fowey...where I had so often trespassed.  And surely the Quiller-Couches had once told me that the owner had been married first to a very beautiful wife, whom he had divorced, and had married again a much younger woman?
     I wondered if she had been jealous of the first wife, as I would have been jealous if my Tommy had been married before he married me...
    Seeds began to drop.  A beautiful home...a first wife...jealousy...a wreck, perhaps at sea, near to the house...But something terrible would have to happen, I did not know what...
     The couple would be living abroad, after some tragedy, there would be an epilogue - but on second thoughts that would have to come at the beginning...
     And thoughts turned to my first encounter with Menabilly, as I made my way down the old driveway from the east lodge, as it were in a dream.

     Thus, Rebecca was born.  Years later, after Rebecca was published, she actually leased Menabilly and lived there.

     Two of her other novels were set largely at Menabilly, The King's General and My Cousin Rachel.

     For fans of du Maurier, this memoir provides insight into the writer and the world of her novels.

     ~ Frances