(1907-1989) UK writer, granddaughter of George Du Maurier, famous (against her will: she thought of herself as an author of psychological studies without genre taint) for dark-hued romances like her most famous tale, Rebecca (1938) – usually set in Cornwall and often – like her first, The Loving Spirit (1931), a ghost story – tinged with the supernatural. There is a hauntedness about her life and work – a sense that very deep issues of Gender tormented her personally while at the same time they enabled her work, which is full of intimate, role-threatening doubles (> Doppelgangers) – that at times evokes the life and work of James Tiptree Jr. Her interest in genre work was as a consequence obscure, though she does gesture towards an sf explanation of the Timeslip in The House on the Strand (1969), for it is Drugs that send its contemporary protagonist into medieval Cornwall. Her worst book, and her one genuine sf novel, Rule Britannia (1972), subjects a Near-Future Cornwall to US Invasion, during which the natives rebel against the tasteless Yankees.

Among du Maurier's shorter works are The Birds (October 1952 Good Housekeeping; 1996 chap), which was included in The Apple Tree: A Short Novel and Some Stories (coll 1952; vt Kiss Me Again, Stranger 1953; vt The Birds and Other Stories 1963), and made by Alfred {HITCHCOCK} into The Birds (1963); and "Don't Look Now" (in Don't Look Now, coll 1966; also included in Not After Midnight, coll 1971; vt Don't Look Now 1971), and filmed by Nicholas {ROEG} as Don't Look Now (1973). She was made a Dame of the British Empire in 1969. [JC]

Dame Daphne Du Maurier

born London: 13 May 1907

died Par, Cornwall: 19 April 1989

works (selected)

• The Loving Spirit (London: William Heinemann, 1931) [hb/]
• The Apple Tree: A Short Novel and Some Stories (London: Victor Gollancz, 1952) [coll: hb/Biro]
  • Kiss Me Again, Stranger: A Collection of Eight Stories, Long and Short (Garden City, New York: Doubleday and Company, 1953) [exp vt of the above: hb/]
  • The Birds and Other Stories (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1963) [coll: vt of the above: pb/]
• The Breaking Point: Eight Stories (London: Victor Gollancz, 1959) [coll: hb/]
  • The Blue Lenses, and Other Stories (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1970) [coll: vt of the above: pb/]
• Don't Look Now (Garden City, New York: Doubleday and Company, 1966) [coll: contains first appearance of title story; contents otherwise differ from Not After Midnight vt Don't Look Now below: hb/]
• The House on the Strand (London: Victor Gollancz, 1969) [hb/Flavia Tower]
• Not After Midnight (London: Victor Gollancz, 1971) [coll: hb/Flavia Tower]
  • Don't Look Now (Garden City, New York: Doubleday and Company, 1971) [vt of the above: hb/]
• Rule Britannia (London: Victor Gollancz, 1972) [hb/Keith Ritchens]
• Echoes from the Macabre: Selected Stories (London: Victor Gollancz, 1976) [coll: hb/]
• Daphne du Maurier's Classics of the Macabre (London: Victor Gollancz, 1987) [coll: hb/]
• The Birds (London: Phoenix, 1996) [story: chap: first published in October 1952 in Good Housekeeping: also see The Apple Tree above: pb/]
• Don't Look Now: Stories (New York: New York Review Books, 2008) [coll: pb/Karen Cytter]

links

Previous versions of this entry

• 11/10/2011
• 17/12/2011
• 21/12/2011
• 05/04/2012
• 30/07/2012