FINDING HERSELF IN FOWEY:
THE CASE OF DAPHNE DU MAURIER
Dr Ella Westland
OUTLINE
Daphne du Maurier herself emphasised the strong link between her identity as a writer
and her personal commitment to Cornwall, her adopted land. This paper sketches
several dimensions of this relationship, and (in Part II) looks at her attitude to tourism
in Cornwall, and her sense of the parallel between a writer's stance and the tourist
gaze.
PART I – Daphne du Maurier and Cornwall
(i)
the case for linking Daphne with Cornwall
(ii)
analysis of Daphne's account of her epiphany on the River Fowey when, as a
young writer, she fell in love with Cornwall
(iii)
the mythologising of a writer's identity, and the modification of her image as a
Cornish writer
PART II – Tourism and the writer's gaze
(iv)
Daphne's attitude to tourism as an incomer to Cornwall
(v)
her changing relationship to Cornwall from 1930s to 1970s
(vi)
her later use of the tourist as a figure for the writer
PART I – Daphne du Maurier and Cornwall
(i)
In the public imagination, Daphne du Maurier is inseparable from Cornwall.
Though she grew up in Hampstead, the second of three daughters of the successful
actor and theatre manager, Gerald du Maurier, she spent two childhood holidays in
Cornwall, and in 1926, when she was 19, she drove down with her mother and sisters
to find a family holiday home. This was a converted boat-house on the bank of the
River Fowey, renamed Ferryside, which is still owned by the du Maurier family.
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Married with three children, she negotiated a lease on the manor house of Menabilly,
near Fowey, moving in during the war and staying for 26 years. When the Rashleigh
family decided to take their house back, they offered her the nearby dower house of
Kilmarth, where she spent the rest of her life.
Half of her fictional output, and most of the famous du Maurier titles that made her
such an extraordinary publishing phenomenon before and after the war – Jamaica Inn,
Frenchman’s Creek, Rebecca, The King’s General, My Cousin Rachel – have Cornish
settings, though of markedly different places and periods. Castle Dor, the novel begun
by her old neighbour and mentor, Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, which she completed on
his death, takes its title from a nearby Iron Age fort. One of her two plays was set at
Ferryside; and the idea for her most famous short story, 'The Birds', came from
watching seagulls follow the plough on the Gribben headland. The House on the
Strand was inspired by her move to Kilmarth, and followed by her last novel Rule
Britannia, set in the same area.
So, according to this widely accepted narrative, Daphne's identity and writing are
inextricably bound up with Cornwall. This image has been relentlessly reinforced by
the media – last summer, TV's Country File focused on the Fowey area, and during
May 2007, the centenary of her birth, coverage includes a radio series on Woman's
Hour of Cornish walks linked to her novels, and a TV programme introduced by the
man who put Padstow on the map, the chef Rick Stein.
(ii) FINDING HERSELF IN FOWEY
In later life, Daphne du Maurier encouraged her audience to identify her with Cornwall.
I'd like now to look now at Daphne's published account of a defining moment in her life
– the discovery of Ferryside, which marked her return to Cornwall as a 19-year-old
fledgling writer.
There was a smell in the air of tar and rope and rusted chain, a smell of tidal
water. Down harbour, round the point, was the open sea. Here was the freedom I
desired, long sought-for, not yet known. Freedom to write, to walk, to wander,
freedom to climb hills, to pull a boat, to be alone. It could not be mere chance
that brought us to the ferry, and the bottom of Bodinnick hill, and so to the
board upon the gate beyond that said For Sale. I remembered a line from a
forgotten book, where a lover looks for the first time upon his chosen one – ‘I
for this, and this for me.’
Vanishing Cornwall (1967), p.6, quoted in Myself When Young (1981) pp.102-03
Already in this journal entry, as she relives her entrancement, Daphne’s distinctive
talents are at work, arousing the reader’s senses with the ‘smell in the air of tar and
rope and rusted chain'. The idea of the boundless ocean, tantalisingly close yet
beyond the point, stirs within the reader an inchoate desire for escape from the
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restrictions of everyday life, offering an image of individual freedom that we will
encounter many times in du Maurier’s Cornish fiction. Daphne's images of the future
are of taking control of her life, walking and climbing, and holding the oars of her
dinghy in her own hands. Yet her future is also laid out before her – there is a sense of
destiny as powerful as that fixed in the premises of romantic fiction in the meant-to-beness of that meeting, a meeting that will bind her to one place for ever.
What, then, caused this sense of recognition, this kind of déjà vu? We can speculate
that Daphne had entered a place already known to her through her reading – as she
grew up, books had been her constant companions, as they are for most inventive
children. It is hard to miss here:
 the inescapable influence of the Romantic movement - Daphne was a devoted
Bronte fan. English culture was (and is) still imbued with Romanticism, and any
whiff of the sea brings it on in bucketfuls;
 the boys' adventure stories she devoured as a child - another vital ingredient in the
chemistry she experiences. We know (because she has singled them out) that her
favourite tales included Treasure Island and Mr Midshipman Easy ;
 the magical island of Peter Pan, a pervasive influence in du Maurier family culture
– J.M.Barrie was the girls' Uncle Jim, who watched them act out Peter Pan in the
nursery, and Daphne's father played the first Captain Hook.
But – if my assumption about this literary construction of Cornwall is correct (and of
course you could equally legitimately go further back, and search for underlying
psychological causes for her favouring these works in her early reading), and we have
some explanation here for her damascene conversion – this does not in any way
undermine its integrity.
There is something else rather intriguing going on in this passage in her easy adoption
of a male stance – when she feels like a lover looking for the first time upon his
chosen one. Daphne had been a defiant tomboy, with a imaginary male alter ego, a
cricket-playing boy named Eric Avon. Because of her occasional bisexual leanings,
much has been made of her reference to what she called her 'boy in the box', which
she said she had to shut away on growing up – but it might be more significant to
speculate that this boy had his freedom when Daphne was in writing mode, and what
her male gaze at her lover, the land, betrays is the insouciance of the androgynous
artist. As a writer she will be free, male and female in one. Or if she has to choose,
she will be male, freely appropriating the land and water in her wandering and her
purposeful oarsmanship.
However we interpret the nuances of the passage, what is being described here is her
emerging sense of selfhood: crystallising around her identity as a writer, and caught
up, inextricably and for ever, from this moment, with her idea of Cornwall.
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(iii)
Or so she says … This account is far from the spontaneity of the diaries that
she and her sister produced at the time. The moment has been re-imagined forty
years later, and carefully positioned in the narrative that represents Daphne's
retrospective understanding of herself – and her projection of a public image.
The decision to include this extract from Vanishing Cornwall in the rather unrevealing
memoir she published at the age of 70 publicly mythologises the event for posterity.
An undeniably powerful passage, it is also in the process of being re-mythologised by
readers, writers, and promoters of Daphne du Maurier. It is now often quoted, and
appears this year on the back cover of the programme advertising the annual Daphne
du Maurier festival in Fowey. And – as with, say, Charles Dickens's Blacking Factory –
the more we talk about it, the harder it is to tell Daphne's story of selfhood any other
way.
Daphne sealed her pact with Cornwall when she not only wrote her first book at
Ferryside on the bank of the River Fowey but made the place the setting and, in some
ways, the subject of The Loving Spirit. So far, so Cornish. But she was not living in
Fowey permanently, and her next two books, I'll Never be Young Again and The
Progress of Julius, ranged ambitiously in their settings from Paris to Stockholm and
Algiers. Evidently at this early stage of her career Daphne did not see herself as in
any sense a 'Cornish novelist'.
Another telling fact is that she composed some of her best-known Cornish books
before she lived at Menabilly, and at a great distance from Cornwall. As the young
wife of a senior army officer, she found herself writing Jamaica Inn in Surrey, Rebecca
in Alexandria, and Frenchman’s Creek in wartime Hertfordshire. Her yearning for
Cornwall made these novels even more atmospheric. But there is anxiety in her mind
about her access to these places even in her memory – in the opening lines of
Rebecca, the narrator passes only with difficulty - in a dream - through the gate of
Manderley:
Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again. It seemed to me I stood by the
iron gate leading to the drive, and for a while I could not enter, for the way was
barred to me.
Daphne wrote most evocatively about Cornwall when she was exiled from the place
she longed for, or haunted by the nightmare of dispossession.
The King's General, a historical novel about Menabilly in the Civil War, was conceived
on first moving to Menabilly – when it was not certain that her tenure of the house
would be a long one. The House on the Strand, a brilliant time travel story set at
Kilmarth, emerged at the time of her move from Menabilly to Kilmarth. In other words,
both books were produced on the cusp of her residence in these houses. During the
26 productive years she spent at Menabilly, the only Cornish novel to appear was My
Cousin Rachel, which bears the marks of an emotionally turbulent period of her inner
life. The estate owned by Rachel's admirers in the novel is a re-invention of Menabilly,
but, far from being a place of contentment, this Menabilly has a decaying corpse
swinging from a gibbet outside its gates and a dark foreign woman within.
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However great Daphne du Maurier's personal need for seclusion and security in order
to write, a need satisfied by her long tenure of Menabilly, and however great her love
of this quiet Cornish house and its dramatic coastal landscape, having a settled
relationship with the place she inhabited was not the driving force that generated the
vividly imagined Cornwall that her readers know.
And – one final, if obvious, point worth stressing about the relationship between
Daphne's beloved Fowey and her representations of Cornwall – Daphne is obviously
not writing about one Cornwall, even when she returns in her fiction to the same
geographical place. Often it is her Gothic imagination that suffuses a lovely landscape
with a sinister atmosphere, projecting the mental state of a tormented narrator. It is not
only an urban landscape (such as the London that our first speaker explored) that can
be multifarious and haunted! And a seascape is of course tantalisingly hard to capture
with its shifts in tides and weather, waves and currents: Daphne was highly sensitive
to all these continual natural changes. Even in her first novel, The Loving Spirit, which
- I have suggested - can be seen as springing from that first moment of identification
with Fowey, and can be read on one level as a reasonably factual account,
geographically and historically, of life in a riverside village, the landscape has a
symbolic use in mapping female identity, as the heroine is torn between domesticity
and wildness, the cottage and the cliffs. Daphne writes always out of her transforming
imagination, and therefore gives us as many Cornwalls as there are chapters in her
Cornish books.
Despite the undeniable symbiosis between Cornwall and Daphne's writing life,
the relationship must be recognised as unstable – and far more problematic
than she was prepared to admit in her later reflections on her own identity as a
writer.
** ** ** ** ** ** ** **
PART II – Tourism and the writer's gaze
There are many models for understanding the dynamics between a person and a
place, and I have already touched briefly on several different ways of dealing with
Daphne and Cornwall. The only moral I would like to draw at this stage is that the
methodologies employed on the Understanding Landscape project will of necessity
have to be plural. But for the final part of this paper, I would like to make specific use
of the concept of the 'tourist gaze', which has proved to be a powerful tool for
understanding the nexus of place/ identity/ modernity since the pioneering publications
of Dean MacCannell in the 1970s. I am not going to look now at the possible
association between the tourist gaze and the incomer gaze, which could (arguably) be
applied to Daphne du Maurier's representations of Cornwall. Instead I am going to
focus on Daphne's own obsession with tourism, her disgust at tourist attitudes, her
admission that she herself played the tourist role (but only when outside Cornwall),
and her growing awareness that, as a writer, she was taking up a position vis-à-vis her
material that was uncomfortably close to the tourist's stance.
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(iv) Daphne was always vexed by the summer intrusion of tourists and holiday
makers into her personal corner of Cornwall. Her Cornish novels tend to use tourism
to highlight the ugliness and artificiality of the modern world, thereby magnifying the
allure of the past. In The House on the Strand, where time travel takes the reader
back to medieval Cornwall, modern bathing huts are described as lining the Cornish
sands on Par Beach ‘like dentures in an open mouth.’ Even in pre-war Rebecca,
holiday-makers threaten the margins of Manderley, not only with the litter and noise
that Daphne detested but also with their degrading lack of appreciation of the
landscape. She was as it were in rightful possession of Menabilly by virtue of her love
of this Cornish coastline, just as Maxim de Winter was the rightful inheritor of
Manderley.
She once admitted in a letter to her socialist publisher, Victor Gollancz, to her gut
reaction against the 'very noisy smelly people' who 'strew the beach, once so white
and lovely, with sandwich papers, cartons, corn-plasters, contraceptives'. This is the
perennial hostility of Cornwall's incomers to lower-class visitors, an attitude which has
been as common among the less well-off writers and artists who have colonised
different areas of Cornwall since the 1880s as among the more privileged owners of
private rural retreats. This may be construed as a politically reactionary withdrawal
from everything repellent in a more egalitarian, crowded Britain. (And it is a reminder, I
think, that we need to make sure that class and politics do not drop out of our new
models for relationships between writing and place – the first substantial academic
piece published on Daphne du Maurier was by Alison Light, coming from the angle of
Raphael Samuel's Oxford History Workshop, a tradition that it is vital to perpetuate.)
(v)
However, Alison Light's brilliant analysis of Daphne's work – which was entitled
'Daphne du Maurier's romance with the past' – has been challenged in various ways
and it certainly does not take full account of her changing relationship with
contemporary Cornwall. If we turn again to Daphne's response to tourism, it ultimately
went far beyond annoyance at the litter and the visitors' lack of respect for rural quiet
to encompass more unsettling implications of tourism as a modern phenomenon. In
Vanishing Cornwall (1967), which involved her in serious research on the region’s
history and politics, she wrote vehemently against Cornwall’s adoption of tourism as
an economic panacea. The need to forge a more robust future for the region than can
be delivered by seasonal tourism was so apparent to Daphne that she even allowed
herself to be drawn into local politics. As an incomer, and a very private person, she
had always remained detached, but in 1969 – though not without some amusement
on her part at her unwonted display of commitment – she accepted an invitation to
join the Cornish nationalist party, Mebyon Kernow, and agreed to write an article for
their magazine.
There is of course considerable irony in the extent to which Daphne herself has
contributed to the development of tourism in Cornwall, though the process took many
years. Jamaica Inn was quick off the mark, turning itself into a well-positioned tourist
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trap on the A30. Daphne wryly admitted in Vanishing Cornwall that by the 1960s the
place she knew was unrecognisable:
Motor-coaches, cars, electric light, a bar … As a motorist I pass by with some
embarrassment, feeling myself to blame, for out of that November evening long
ago came a novel which proved popular, passing, as fiction does, into the folklore of the district. As the author I am flattered, but as a one-time wanderer
dismayed. (146)
The phenomenon of literary tourism – currently a hot academic topic – is not new to
Cornwall. But when I came to Cornwall in 1989, the year of Daphne du Maurier's
death, there was nothing in the Fowey area or the tourist board's publicity to capitalise
on her work. Now, however, it is loudly marketed as 'du Maurier country', and Blue
Badge tourist guides are trained to take visitors on du Maurier walks and coach tours.
Since 1997, an annual 'Daphne du Maurier Festival of Arts & Literature' has been held
in Fowey every May, and its contribution to extending the tourist season has been
estimated at £1m for the local economy. It is hard to make such events self-financing,
and the size of the district council's annual subsidy, running at around £90,000 per
year, shows the significance of its impact.
** ** **
Daphne, of course, would have hated all this. Her unbridled rhetoric against tourism
had been tamed by her editors before Vanishing Cornwall’s publication, but in her last
novel, Rule Britannia (1972), she took the opportunity to let rip. The plot is based on
the fantasy of an American occupation of Britain, forcing an alliance known as US UK
(or USUK) . The US has plans to turn the whole of the UK into a theme park for the
benefit of global tourists, but while central government feebly complies with US
pressure, the plot is foiled by the Cornish – by the clay-workers, farmers and
fishermen who lived in the district around her home at Kilmarth. Here we find a very
different view of Cornwall which engages, really for the first time in her fiction, with the
question of 'Cornishness' versus her own adopted Cornish identity – another topic
which will have to be set aside for another time!
Lastly, I'd like to consider her reflections on the 'tourist gaze' – which will take us
beyond Cornwall but back to heart of a writer's identity.
(vi) The problem of tourism, in Daphne’s view, extended far beyond the West
Country: in her vision of the twentieth century, tourism was ruining the whole of
Europe. Her novels and stories are laced with despairing references to tourism, which
had become for her something of an obsession. Yet Daphne was herself an
experienced European traveller, who latterly took Mediterranean holidays with her
grown-up children. Trips to Crete and Urbino with her son and daughter-in-law
inspired the story ‘Not After Midnight’ and the Gothic novel The Flight of the Falcon,
and incidents on a visit to Venice with her daughter Tessa sowed the seeds of the
story ‘Don’t Look Now’.
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No innocent abroad, she recognised that she was behaving in the same way as the
visitors she resented in her own land, and tourism became a complex theme of her
later work.
For example: a clever play on the notion of tourists as voyeurs is entwined through
the sinister story ‘Not After Midnight’. The narrator is another of du Maurier’s
inadequate men, one Timothy Grey, a prep school teacher, who goes to Crete on a
painting holiday:
I was shown a brochure which seemed to meet my requirements. A pleasantly
situated hotel close to the sea, and chalets by the water’s edge where one slept
and breakfasted. Clientèle well-to-do, and although I count myself no snob I
cannot abide paper-bags and orange-peel.
Mr Grey may deny snobbery, but his polite shrinking from the ‘paper-bags and
orange-peel’ of the lower-class holiday maker is imbued with a patronising, oldfashioned fastidiousness. It is an attitude not far, of course, from the author’s own
instincts.
Grey’s instinct for privacy in this scene is compromised early in his visit by the
behaviour of an American couple from the next beach-side chalet. He realises that
he is being watched through binoculars from a motor boat as if he were another
species of local fauna. The intrusive flash of those field glasses punctuates the
story, and the sight of a snorkel pipe, probing the water below his chalet that night
‘like a minute periscope’ is another intrusion on his retreat. Spying and counterespionage become an emerging motif of the narrative, as Grey drives after the
couple into the tourist town. He spends an evening ostensibly sitting in a café on the
harbour, ‘savouring what is known as “local colour”, amused by the passing crowd’.
Indistinguishable in his behaviour from other tourists like himself, he is actually on
the watch for the mysterious, possibly murderous fellow guests from his hotel. The
reader cannot miss the clear parallels between normal tourist behaviour and an
unscrupulous interest in other people’s business.
Elsewhere du Maurier wittily explores the more disturbing aspects of the tourist
gaze, describing German visitors in post-war Italy, armed with their ciné-cameras as
machine-gunners 'sweeping their field of fire’. But in presenting objectionable
characters whose staring and spying throw the tourist project into question, she
invites the reader to turn that critical gaze on themselves. Is it morally right, let alone
ultimately beneficial to those places and peoples under scrutiny from those caféwatchers, camera-wavers, and consumers of other people’s culture, to play the
tourist role? We come away from Daphne’s stories squirming at the thought of our
own holiday selves.
Further, it did not escape her that authors were as culpable as tourists in the selfcentred way that they observed other communities for their own purposes. The
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anxieties of authorship frequently surface in Daphne's fiction, and at this meta-level
the reader becomes aware of her concern, even her cynicism, about the conditions
and ethics of creativity. Daphne describes in the preface to one of her collections of
short stories how, as a young writer, she found that ‘something observed, something
said,’ as she sat in a Parisian café or with a French friend, provided the seed for a
later story (The Rendezvous, p.xiii). Writers are voyeurs, always watching other
people and mentally storing away material for future use. In this respect, they are not
unlike tourists with their insatiable thirst for new cultural experiences to be recounted
on postcards and captured by their ever-ready cameras.
It is worth considering how far it is necessary to remain aloof from a place before you
can 'write it'. Geographical distance certainly helped Daphne du Maurier to conjure up
her desired Cornwall. And if you are trying to capture a place on paper while
remaining resident, do you have to harden yourself to look at it through a visitor's
eyes? Must you scan your neighbours through field glasses from a distance, or poke
up a sneaky periscope in order to make your close-up observations? Du Maurier's
work heightens our consciousness of the complex dynamics of writing and place, and
offers a provocative starting point for the Understanding Landscape experiment.
By the end of the project, I trust, we will have identified new approaches that can be
used to reveal further dimensions of the particular case of Daphne du Maurier and
Cornwall.
** ** ** ** ** ** ** **
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SHORT BIBLIOGRAPHY
Daphne du Maurier's representations of Cornwall
Novels
1931
1936
1938
1941
1946
1951
1962
1969
1972
Story
1952
Play
1949
Non-fiction
1967
1977
1981
THE LOVING SPIRIT
JAMAICA INN
REBECCA
FRENCHMAN'S CREEK
THE KING'S GENERAL
MY COUSIN RACHEL
CASTLE DOR (with Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch)
THE HOUSE ON THE STRAND
RULE BRITANNIA
THE BIRDS
SEPTEMBER TIDE
VANISHING CORNWALL
MYSELF WHEN YOUNG: THE SHAPING OF A WRITER
THE REBECCA NOTEBOOK AND OTHER MEMORIES
Biography
Angela du Maurier, It's Only the Sister: An Autobiography (1951), Truran 2003
Margaret Forster, Daphne du Maurier, Chatto & Windus 1993
Flavia Leng, A Daughter’s Memoir, Mainstream 1994
Oriel Malet, ed., Letters from Menabilly, Weidenfeld & Nicholson 1993
Noël Welch, 'The du Mauriers', Cornish Review, Summer 1973
Criticism
Nina Auerbach, Daphne du Maurier: Haunted Heiress, Pennsylvania University Press 2000
Avril Horner and Sue Zlosnik, Daphne du Maurier: Writing, Identity and the Gothic
Imagination, Macmillan 1998
Alison Light, Forever England: Femininity, Literature and Conservatism between the Wars,
Routledge 1991
Helen Taylor, ed., The Daphne du Maurier Companion, Virago 2007
Ella Westland, Reading Daphne, Truran 2007
** ** ** ** ** ** ** **
Note: - Much of the material in this paper has subsequently appeared in other forms. See
Reading Daphne and two pieces in the Virago Companion, ed. Taylor. For a more detailed
analysis of another writer/ Cornwall relationship, see Ella Westland, ‘D.H. Lawrence’s
Cornwall: dwelling in a precarious age’, in Cultural Geographies, 9, 2002: 266-85.
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