Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present
Daphne Du Maurier
-
Standard Name: Du Maurier, Daphne
Birth Name: Daphne du Maurier
Nickname: Bing
Married Name: Daphne Browning
DDM
, who published throughout the middle years of the twentieth century, was primarily a novelist, though she wrote non-fiction—biography, plays, and screenplays—as well. Her work was adapted into film and television by such esteemed people and organizations as Alfred Hitchcock
and the BBC
. Nevertheless critical opinion of her filmed work has not been high. Because two romance novels, Rebecca and Frenchman's Creek, were DDM
's best-loved and most-remembered works, she struggled, without success, to prove her literary worth outside that genre for the rest of her career. She is often thought of as writing primarily for women, though she frequently used the male voice, and evidently felt at home in it.
"Daphne Du Maurier" Retrieved from https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e3/Young_Daphne_du_Maurier.jpg.This work is licensed under the Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal (CC0 1.0) Public Domain Dedication license. This work is in the public domain.
NA
's story Car appeared (along with stories by fifteen others including Kate Clanchy
and Daphne Du Maurier
) in Something Was There, edited by Kate Pullinger
, a ghost-story anthology published by Virago
.
Blackwell’s Online Bookshop.
OCLC WorldCat.
Education
Bryony Lavery
BL
claims that at school she was taught Beginner's Reality, Intermediate Boundaries and Advanced Narrow Thinking.
Blain, Virginia, Patricia Clements, and Isobel Grundy, editors. The Feminist Companion to Literature in English: Women Writers from the Middle Ages to the Present. Yale University Press; Batsford, 1990.
She also swott[ed] for Latin, English and History A-levels, while periodically bunking off to read Georgette Heyer
and Daphne du Maurier
Education
Pat Arrowsmith
She did not learn the facts of life until she was eleven or twelve. Before that she knew that kittens came out of cats, but not how they got there. Her self-education about sexuality was...
Education
Malorie Blackman
MB
was shaped by her reading outside school. She never entered a bookshop until she was fourteen, but relied on libraries. Early favourites were C. S. Lewis
's Narnia books, Johanna Spyri
's Heidi books...
Family and Intimate relationships
Sir J. M. Barrie
Without children of his own, Barrie had a habit of monopolising the children of friends, for whom he invented elaborate games. Among children so situated were Bevil Quiller-Couch
(who was later the fiancé of the...
Fictionalization
Anna Leonowens
The story of AL
's life in Siam was romanticized in 1944 by Margaret Landon
in Anna and the King of Siam. This in turn spawned the Rodgers
and Hammerstein
Tony-winning musical The King...
Her English literary friends included Stella Benson
and Daphne Du Maurier
.
Intertextuality and Influence
Bryony Lavery
Her Aching Heart, with music by Juliet Hill
, can be described either as parodying historical romance by taking the literary territory of, say, Georgette Heyer
and making its love-interest lesbian—or as parodying the...
Intertextuality and Influence
Monica Dickens
When, however, on the same occasion of their first meeting, MD
told Charles Pick
she had been working as a cook-general, he (and later his employer, Michael Joseph
) were eager for her to write...
Intertextuality and Influence
Elizabeth Taylor
Palladian presents a thick weave of literary allusions.
Beauman, Nicola. The Other Elizabeth Taylor. Persephone Books, 2009.
161-2
Leclercq, Florence. Elizabeth Taylor. Twayne, 1985.
10
As its title implies, this novel is set in a country house dating back to the eighteenth century. Just as the title suggests the English...
Intertextuality and Influence
Rose Tremain
Most of the stories concern love, and some make creative use of the lives or works of other authors, like Tolstoy
and Daphne Du Maurier
. In The Closing DoorRT
created a character who...
Literary responses
Irene Handl
Almost all responses to this novel quoted on the cover of its 1985 reprint use somewhere the word original. The Sioux was welcomed at its first appearance by Noel Coward
and by Daphne du Maurier
Literary responses
Jean Plaidy
Reviewers greeted this novel with praise, drawing parallels with Brontë
's Jane Eyre and Du Maurier
's Rebecca. Alex Stuart
in John O' London's noted its utterly compulsive, drug-like, addictive quality.
Eleanor Alice Burford Hibbert: "Queen of Romantic Suspense".
Twenty years...
Literary responses
Mary Stewart
This novel was welcomed by fellow novelists. In the TLS advertisement that heralded it, Daphne du Maurier
called it a brave start and Patricia Wentwortha delightful work; cultured and charming, besides being very exciting...
George du Maurier
(grandfather of Daphne
) serialized in Harper's Monthly Magazine his famous Trilby, a novel about the evil Jewish mesmerist, Svengali, and his young female victim.
15 June 2007
Tatiana de Rosnay
, born in France in 1961 to an English mother and Russian father, published her first and most famous English-language novelSarah's Key, which in 2015 had sold nine million copies around the world.