Daphne du Maurier and her Sisters. Jane Dunn

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СКАЧАТЬ Daphne had been writing a few startling short stories since she was a girl and then, sometime later in 1929, had begun her first novel. The Loving Spirit, a rather more conventional adventure story, was spiced with what was to become the characteristic du Maurier sense of menace. This too was not a particularly good book but it was a much safer subject and easily found a publisher in 1931. Daphne was launched as a writer on a spectacular career that powered her through four books in five years to the darkly atmospheric Jamaica Inn and then, two years later in 1938, her creative prodigy Rebecca stormed to bestseller status. The momentum was now entirely with her. Daphne’s writing career, financial security and reputation were all made by the phenomenal success of Rebecca, and the haunting Hitchcock film that followed. The eclipse of her sisters was complete.

      Jeanne, seven years younger than Angela, had also made a bold move that went against the powerful family ethos. She had tried her hand at music and was a fine pianist all her life, but her real love was painting. Hers was a family brought up to decry anything modern in the arts. The French Impressionists, the English Post-Impressionists, whose exhibition in London in 1910 had caused uproar among polite society, all horrified their father Gerald du Maurier. He was vocal in his derision of any art after the mid-nineteenth century and his opinions were held in Mosaic regard by his adoring family. ‘Daddy loathed practically everything that was modern. He hated modern music, modern painting, modern architecture and the modern way of living … Gauguin horrified him I do remember,’ Angela wrote, adding, ‘I’m not at all sure it’s a good thing to be as impressed by one’s parents’ ideas and opinions as I was by Daddy’s.’³

      Angela was not alone. All the sisters were in awe of their father’s opinion on most things and Angela and Daphne never came to appreciate twentieth-century art. This made it all the more remarkable, but also painful for her, that Jeanne made her career as a painter, not of conventional, narrative, realistic pictures that her family might have appreciated, but of quiet, contemplative, modernist works. Her family did not value her art enough to hang it with pleasure on their walls, although her paintings were considered good enough by the art establishment to be bought by at least one public gallery. Jeanne seemed not to long for children, neither did she court fame, but her painting was the mainspring of her life and her immediate family’s lack of appreciation of her work was a kind of denial too.

      The intriguing threads of inheritance, character, family mythology and circumstance combine with early experience to create the pattern of a life. It is in childhood that these elements make their deepest impression. Here can be found possible reasons for Angela’s lack of perseverance that became a lasting regret: ‘I have always been an easily discouraged person … I had not the “guts” to start again writing’.⁴ Inheritance and familial experiences gave Daphne the contrary commitment; imagination and writing were the things most worthwhile in life. It helped that her talent was encouraged by her doting Daddy who saw so much in his favourite tomboy daughter to remind him of his own father. ‘[He] told me how he had always hoped that one day I should write, not poems, necessarily, but novels … “You remind me so of Papa,” he said. “Always have done. Same forehead, same eyes. If only you had known him.”’⁵

      In childhood Jeanne found the seeds of her later independence. Her mother’s favourite and perhaps the most honest and down-to-earth of them all, she was the youngest sister who chose a discredited style of painting as her life’s work and managed to live openly until her death with a woman poet as her partner, despite the oft-expressed antipathy of her father towards people like her.

      The sense the family had of being glamorous, exceptional and blessed with French blood was reinforced by the private language they shared. This was a highly visual and entertaining creation that bound them together as a tribe and kept out pretenders. Daphne’s fascination with the Brontës and Gondal, their imaginary world, brought the verb ‘to Gondal’ into the sisters’ lexicon, meaning to make-believe or elaborate upon. Nicknames too were a du Maurier habit. Angela became various forms of ‘Puff’, ‘Piff’ and ‘Piffy’; Daphne was ‘Tray’, ‘Track’ or ‘Bing’; and Jeanne was ‘Queenie’ or ‘Bird’.

      Exploring Daphne’s character and work in the context of her sisters, means she appears in a quite different light from the one that shines on her as the solitary subject of a life. She was shyly awkward and intransigent, a girl who escaped into her own imaginary world, where she was supreme. Intent on wresting control over her destiny she thereby influenced the lives of others, not least her sisters’.

      In introducing her two much less famous sisters, I hope this book draws them from the shadows. I like to think that Angela, who longed for more notice during her lifetime and dreamed of having a film made from at least one of her stories (Daphne had ten – the unforgettable Rebecca, The Birds and Don’t Look Now among them), would have been delighted to be rediscovered, her books read, possibly even inspiring a belated dramatisation. Where Daphne controlled her universe, Angela, at the mercy of her emotions, seemed to be buffeted by hers. Unfocused when young, and wilting under pressure, her youth was marked by humiliations and missed opportunities, while she was intent on the pursuit of love. Later she discovered a remarkable courage to tackle in her novels and her life injustice in matters of the heart, and to live as unconventionally as she pleased. As she aged, however, the constraining bonds of her Edwardian upbringing tightened around her once more.

      A little light shed on Jeanne might also lead to a wider audience for her art, with paintings taken out of storage in small galleries and hung on the walls, for new generations to appreciate. The largest public collection is at the Royal West of England Academy in Bristol, where the quiet atmospheric beauty of her works rewards the eye with a spare, unsentimental vision. She was perhaps the most solid and least flighty of them all. Jeanne was always the honest, boy-like sister and did not apparently struggle with questions of identity or her role in life. When she decided what she wanted to do, all her energy was committed to it, unlikely to be deflected by emotion or propriety.

      Much has been written on every aspect of Daphne du Maurier’s work and life. Margaret Forster’s impressive biography published nearly twenty years ago remains the authority on her life, but there are other essential contributions from Judith Cook’s Daphne: A Portrait of Daphne du Maurier and Oriel Malet’s Letters from Menabilly. Her daughter Flavia Leng’s poignant memoir adds another layer of understanding. Daphne’s writing attracted penetrating analysis in Avril Horner and Sue Zlosnik’s Daphne du Maurier: Writing, Identity and the Gothic Imagination, and in Nina Auerbach’s personal take on the themes of Daphne’s fiction in Daphne du Maurier, Haunted Heiress. The rewarding mix of The Daphne du Maurier Companion, edited by Helen Taylor, and Ella Westland’s Reading Daphne, add their own layers of meaning. There is also a highly successful yearly literary festival at Fowey, established to honour Daphne’s close connection and imaginative contribution to that part of south-east Cornwall.

      In this book I do not set out to write a full biography of each sister; nor have I the space to analyse their individual works in any depth, although I have discussed them when they offer extra biographical or psychological insights to the story. I have considered the du Maurier sisters side by side, as they lived in life. This adds a new perspective to the characters of each, as they evolve through the tensions and connections of ideas and feelings that flow within any close relationship. Most marked is how much the opinions and experiences of one sister find their way into the work of another. In their fiction particularly, Angela and Daphne each used aspects of their sisters’ lives to animate her own work. But all the du Maurier sisters drew on their unique childhood, a past that was always present, bringing light and dark to their lives and work.

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