Manderley Forever: The Life of Daphne du Maurier

"When I first heard there was going to be a new biography, I thought, ‘Well, Margaret Forster does a fantastic job, so what’s the new angle going to be?’ There have been good biographies of du Maurier before. We already know the big landmarks in her life. But what de Rosnay shares with du Maurier is her Franco-British identity. Manderley Forever really captures the richness of Daphne’s time in Paris in the 1920s and the enduring importance of her French heritage throughout her writing life. What this biography does above all is to re-invest the story of her life with suspense, with the texture of emotions she’s going through. You get caught up in it. It’s a real page-turner. It feels like a du Maurier novel. “It’s a real page-turner. It feels like a Du Maurier novel” It taps into something that fans of Daphne—and I count myself in that group, because I first read her when I was 14—love. Readers become obsessed and want to visit the places of the novels. Of course, you often can’t: you can’t go to Menabilly; you can only get a glimpse of it. But what Tatiana de Rosnay captures really well is the desire to be close to these places. That desire springs in part because du Maurier is so brilliant at creating a sense of landscape in her writing. When you read The House on the Strand (1969) and go to Tywardreath in Cornwall, you feel as though you’ve viscerally experienced the places where the story happens already. De Rosnay mimics Daphne’s own style of writing biography: putting herself into the story, thinking about the connections between her own life and the life of her subject, and writing in this novelistic way (e.g. du Maurier’s biography of Branwell Brontë). I don’t think de Rosnay was doing this consciously, necessarily (I’ve interviewed her a few times, and we’ve talked about this), but it really works. If Daphne had written her own life story, I think it may have read like Manderley Forever. Even the first novel, The Loving Spirit , immediately captured the public’s imagination, particularly the imagination of her then-future husband, Frederick Browning. Tommy, as he was known in the family, read the book and thought, ‘Wow, I’d love to meet the woman who wrote this novel.’ He sailed down to Fowey, sailed up and down in front of Ferryside. Daphne and her sister Angela were inside. Angela said, ‘Come and have a look! There’s a handsome man who keeps sailing up and down in front of the house. Who is he?’ They met, fell for each other, and quickly got married in Lanteglos Church, where the characters marry at the end of The Loving Spirit . In a beautiful way, du Maurier wrote her own story. It’s amazing. Life and fiction intersect throughout her life, really. Tommy and Daphne went sailing on the Helford river for their honeymoon and they found themselves at Frenchman’s Creek, which became the setting for her famous 1941 novel. Obviously, going to Fowey is the big landmark moment in the mid-twenties. The family renovate Ferryside; Daphne has real freedom for the very first time. Then she finds Menabilly, the Manderley house. She trespasses; she thinks about it constantly. The house is very run-down; it seems like this fairytale, almost- Sleeping Beauty- like house. Yes, she does. She finally persuades the Rashleigh family, who own the house, to allow her to rent it (and restore it as it was in quite a state) and she moves in by Christmas of 1943, five years after the publication of Rebecca . But from the moment she discovered it at the end of the twenties, she immediately thought of it as her “house of secrets”, her “house of stories.” “Life and fiction intersect all throughout her life” In a way, the house is waiting for du Maurier to wake it up. She wrote that at night, when everyone is sleeping, “the house whispers her secrets, and the secrets turn to stories, and in strange and eerie fashion we are one, the house and I.” In Rebecca , there’s a powerful sense of wanting to possess Manderley, and of the house being a character in its own right. This is partly because when writing the novel, du Maurier wasn’t in Cornwall—she was partly in Egypt and partly in England, but not Cornwall. What she wanted more than anything was to be back in the place that she loved. So there’s a real desire for this elusive, secretive house and that’s why it has such a tangible, imaginative presence in Rebecca . Once she moves in, The King’s General is the first proper ‘Menabilly novel.’"