The King's General

"That was deliberate. I wanted to not only showcase the range and versatility of her writing, but also get people to read some of her books they wouldn’t otherwise know about. I also picked this particular novel for du Maurier’s historical research, which is incredibly meticulous and accurate. King’s General is the great novel of Menabilly. Again, the house a character. What’s more, there’s a strong female narrator. Du Maurier is often known for her male narrators. Unusually, King’s General , Rebecca and The Glass-Blowers have female narrators. Honor Harris is one of the great du Maurier heroines. She’s strong, rebellious, adventurous, independent, and a writer keen to have her own voice. I love the way King’s General opens with her saying that while Sir Richard Grenvile’s public defence of his actions, written in exile in Holland, is discussed by the world, ‘I will say for Richard what he never said for himself’. She takes control of history’s assessment of her lover and tells her side of the story. It’s an English Civil War novel set in Cornwall. Here, the Civil War plays out differently than elsewhere in the country. Cornwall is staunchly royalist, with all kinds of connections to the crown and Richard Grenvile is the King’s General in the West, leading the fight for the royalists. What interests Daphne is that the Cornish spirit is one of independence and rebellion—a notion which comes up in other novels such as her last, Rule Britannia . The King’s General is about the love affair between Honor Harris and Richard Grenvile, which goes on for the whole of their lives, despite the fact they never actually marry. Richard marries someone else, and very early on in the novel, Honor suffers a terrible accident. There’s an incredibly dramatic set-piece scene where they’re hawking with Gartred, Richard’s sister, whose ‘serpent’s eyes’ and ‘hard, voluptuous mouth’ remind us of Rebecca de Winter. Gartred doesn’t warn Honor that there’s a chasm and as they’re riding their horses, and the falcons are flying. Honor falls and then is disabled for the rest of the book; she’s in a wheelchair. This doesn’t stop her from doing achieving all kinds of feats in the novel, though. She goes off and becomes a kind of camp follower, trailing Sir Richard around. She’s right at the heart of things in Menabilly, and starts to gradually find out the house’s secrets, including a hidden room in the buttress that plays a crucial role at the end of the novel. She’s also there at the great sack of Menabilly, that amazing scene where she’s playing cards with Gartred as their enemies strip the house. Her and Gartred are sort of enemies throughout the book. Quite often you get a strong sense of female rivalry in du Maurier’s work, just as you see with Rebecca and the second Mrs de Winter. Definitely. Du Maurier uses Gothic tropes to invest the story with drama and emotion but predominantly it is a historical novel. Yes that’s right. Writing a play-script was nothing new to her—she grew up in the theatre. Many of her novels, The Parasites in particular, have a vivid sense of setting, you can really picture where the characters are in the scene. Du Maurier is fascinated by houses and places, almost like a theatre set. This is part of why Hitchcock liked her. Not only for suspense and atmosphere, but also the strength of visual setting in her works. Hitchcock’s relationship with Daphne du Maurier’s books—much like his relationship with women in general—is that he pretends she wasn’t a great influence on him. But she was. She taught him about suspense. She’s a great plotter, good at cliff-hangers and unexpected endings. Ultimately, du Maurier didn’t like Hitchcock’s take on Jamaica Inn . But she did like his adaptation of Rebecca . As with Jamaica Inn , he had to make changes in line with The Hays Code, the motion picture production code. You couldn’t have a hero get away with murder in films of that period. This is why Max de Winter has to push Rebecca. She bangs her head and is ‘accidentally’ killed, whereas in the book, she’s very clearly murdered and this is crucial to the plot. “Hitchcock pretends du Maurier wasn’t a great influence on him. But she was. She taught him about suspense” Jamaica Inn faces the same problem. In the book, du Maurier’s great trick is that the real villain is the vicar. But you couldn’t have an evil vicar in a Hollywood movie in the thirties, so the evil vicar is replaced by a caricatured, evil squire played by Charles Laughton, who had far too much interest in shaping the plot to his own liking. As a film, Jamaica Inn just didn’t really work in the way that Rebecca did, with the terrifying Judith Anderson as Mrs Danvers and the oversized set that made Joan Fontaine’s Mrs de Winter look even more insignificant and small. It’s a shame that The King’s General wasn’t made into a film but it would have been a huge undertaking to produce such a large scale historical adaptation. Definitely. She brings it alive. You feel like you’re living that period of history, emotionally. Even though we know the outcome—it doesn’t ultimately end happily for the Cornish—we can’t help but be impressed by the way she intersects Honor’s personal narrative with public events. The sack of Menabilly by the Parliamentarians takes place at the same time as the Royalists fight to regain control of the surrounding land, it’s incredibly dramatic. Here, her historical research is brilliant. She went back to original documents, and read up-to-the-minute research. She taught herself. That’s one of the things I think is most extraordinary about her. She read and studied all of these original documents, despite having no university education. She was just a voracious reader who read everything. And this eclectic reading continued throughout her life: she was well read in English literature and classical mythology, but she was fascinated by history and psychology too. She loved doing research. She would have made a great university student, actually. But that just wasn’t something women of her class and background did."