Daphne du Maurier: The Unlikely Rebel Who Chose Freedom

Part of the Unlikely Rebels series — stories of women you thought you knew: gentle, reassuring, harmless. They were anything but.

Daphne du Maurier is often remembered as the romantic novelist behind Rebecca. I discovered a fiercely independent woman who escaped London society for Cornwall, sailed alone in the 1920s, guarded her solitude, and quietly wrote some of the darkest fiction of her century.

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A Sofa, a Cushion, and a Father Who Couldn’t Explain

It started with a film.

I was a child, sitting beside my father on the sofa, watching Hitchcock’s The Birds. My father was a patient and knowledgeable man who could explain almost anything. That evening, for the first time I could remember, he could not.

Why were the birds attacking? What had the world done to deserve this? The parakeets in the little girl’s cage. Tippi Hedren on that beautiful lake, a seagull diving at her without warning or reason. And then, worst of all, the birds coming down through the chimney.

I watched from behind a cushion and could not look away.

Years later, I discovered that Hitchcock had based his film on a short story by a certain Daphne du Maurier. Something clicked into place. Though it would take me a few more decades, and one mystery novel of my own, to understand quite what.

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The Daphne I Thought I Knew

Because here is my confession as a reader.

For years, Daphne du Maurier lived on my mental bookshelf under “romantic novelist”. Cornwall, windswept cliffs, brooding gentlemen, a shy Englishwoman writing moody love stories by the sea. Two lines on a back cover, once again.

Then came Rebecca. First the film, then the novel, exactly as with The Birds. That world of seeing and not seeing, where love and dread walk hand in hand through every page. Mrs Danvers at the window. The second wife with no name of her own, lost in the shadow of a dead woman who fills every room.

I understood then that du Maurier was something rarer than a thriller writer. She was a writer of the mind’s darkest rooms, and she happened to set them in Cornwall.

But it was only when I began researching my new cozy mystery, Cornwall’s Deadly Series, set in her beloved Fowey, that I met the woman herself. And once again, the woman turned out to be nothing like the back cover.

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Here We Go Again

If you’ve been following this series, you know the pattern by now.

Beatrix Potter: the lady of the watercolour bunnies who turned out to be a sharp-minded naturalist and one of Britain’s great conservationists. I wrote about her here.

Louisa May Alcott: the wholesome author of Little Women who turned out to be an abolitionist’s daughter, a war nurse, a secret thriller writer and the financial backbone of her whole family. Her story is here.

Gentle on the cover. Radical in real life.

And now, a third.

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Born Into the Spotlight

Daphne’s rebellion, though, runs in exactly the opposite direction to Louisa’s.

Louisa May Alcott was made by her radical family. Daphne du Maurier ran away from her glittering one.

Her father was Gerald du Maurier, quite simply the most famous actor-manager in London, the first stage Captain Hook, a man whose house at Hampstead was permanently full of theatre people, parties and performance. Her grandfather was George du Maurier, the novelist and Punch illustrator who wrote Trilby and gave the English language the word “Svengali”.

Daphne was born in 1907 into the very centre of fashionable, theatrical, brilliant London society.

Most girls would have called it a fairy tale. Daphne called it a cage.

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The Girl Who Refused to Leave

In 1926, the du Maurier women went house-hunting by the sea in Cornwall. They looked at Looe first, and Daphne found it too closed in. Then they crossed a river by ferry and saw a house at Bodinnick called Swiss Cottage, sitting right on the water opposite the little harbour town of Fowey.

Daphne was nineteen. She saw the harbour, and the creek, and the way the light fell on the water, and she simply refused to leave.

The house became Ferryside, and it became her escape hatch. When the rest of the family went back to London at the end of that first season, Daphne was allowed to stay on alone. For the first time in her life she had her own space, away from the parties, the visitors, the social performance that came with being a du Maurier.

And what did the well-bred daughter of London’s theatrical royalty do with her freedom?

She put on trousers. She talked to the fishermen and learned the lore of the harbour. She fished. And above all, she learned to sail, and then she went out to sea alone, a young woman in a boat with no chaperone and no audience, in the 1920s.

Her first novel, The Loving Spirit, was written in that house, between one tide and the next.

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The Society She Chose

Now, here’s the detail I admire most. Daphne didn’t reject people. She rejected society, which is a very different thing.

In Fowey she built her own circle, made entirely of people who actually interested her. Chief among them was Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, “Q” to everyone, the great Cornish man of letters and Cambridge professor who lived in Fowey and became her mentor and a sort of second literary family. His daughter Foy became one of Daphne’s closest friends.

It was with Foy, by the way, that Daphne went riding across Bodmin Moor, got thoroughly lost in the mist, and took shelter at a lonely coaching inn. The inn was called Jamaica Inn. You may have heard what she did with that.

Fishermen, boatmen, a crusty professor, a riding companion for getting lost on moors: this was the society Daphne chose over the most brilliant drawing rooms in London.

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The Reader Who Sailed In

And then her love story arrived. By sea, naturally.

A young Army officer, Major Frederick Browning, known to everyone as Boy, read The Loving Spirit and was so taken with it that he sailed his boat into Fowey harbour to meet the woman who had written it.

Picture the scene from Daphne’s side. A handsome stranger appears in your harbour, drawn there by your own words, and he handles a boat beautifully. For a young woman whose idea of happiness was the open sea, it was practically a love letter in nautical form. She went out to meet him in her own boat, which tells you everything: this was not a courtship of drawing rooms and dance cards. It was conducted on the water, as equals.

They married in 1932 at the little church of Lanteglos, reachable from Ferryside by boat, and spent their honeymoon not in some grand hotel but aboard her beloved Ygdrasil.

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Two Lives, Two Directions

It would be lovely to say they sailed happily ever after. Life, as usual, had other plans.

Boy’s career took him upward and inward: to high command, to the war, and afterwards to London, to the royal household, to precisely the world of official dinners, receptions and polite conversation that Daphne had spent her whole youth escaping. He thrived in it. She couldn’t breathe in it.

So while her husband navigated society, Daphne stayed in Cornwall, guarding her solitude, her writing and her sea. They remained married, but increasingly they lived parallel lives, his in London, hers by the water. She had run away from that world once, at nineteen. She was not going back to it at forty, not even for love.

You may call that selfish. I call it remarkably consistent. Daphne du Maurier knew exactly what she needed in order to write, and she protected it, decade after decade, against every social expectation placed on a general’s wife.

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Menabilly: In Love With a House

And then there is the greatest love story of her life, which involved no man at all.

As a young woman, Daphne heard of an old manor hidden in the woods on the Gribbin peninsula, and went looking for it, trespassing through the overgrown grounds of the Rashleigh estate until she found it: Menabilly, grey, shuttered, sleeping, slowly falling into ruin.

She fell in love on the spot. And then she waited. She wrote letters about it, walked its grounds, watched it decay, for the better part of twenty years, until at last the family agreed to rent it to her. Not sell. Rent. She restored it, raised her children there, wrote there, and loved it fiercely for over a quarter of a century, always knowing it could never be hers. In the end, the lease ran out and she had to leave.

If Manderley, the great haunted house of Rebecca, feels almost alive on the page, this is why. Daphne wasn’t inventing a house. She was describing a passion.

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Not a Romantic Novelist At All

Which brings us back to that label on my mental bookshelf.

Rebecca is not a romance. It is a study in jealousy, obsession and psychological domination, narrated by a heroine so erased that she is never given a name, with an ending that comforts absolutely nobody. The Birds is apocalypse without explanation. Don’t Look Now still frightens people who have never read a word of it, through the film alone.

Hitchcock adapted her three times. He knew exactly what she was.

She, meanwhile, spent her whole career being called a romantic novelist, and loathed it. Her rebellion, once again, was quiet: she simply went on writing the dark, ambiguous, unsettling books she wanted to write, and let the labels say what they liked.

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My Own Confession

And now, a confession of my own, which regular readers of my author’s notes will already know.

I have never been to Fowey.

I have been to Devon, which is close enough to feel like a near miss. In 2014, Giovanni, our golden retriever Frodo and I did a homeswap in Salcombe, and from those cliffs Cornwall glittered on the horizon like a promise just out of reach.

We managed a single afternoon at the Eden Project, where dogs were not yet admitted; Frodo remained at the house, deeply unimpressed, and the guilt was so acute that we drove straight back and abandoned every other Cornish plan. That is the power a furry being has over you.

So when I decided to send Etta, Dora and Leon to Fowey for their ninth homeswap, I did what Daphne would never have done: I explored her town from a desk. I walked the Hall Walk on Google Street View. I watched the ferry cross from Fowey to Bodinnick on YouTube, always with a seagull in the way. And I fell for the place completely, sight unseen, which is perhaps the most du Maurier thing I have ever done.

The result is Cornwall’s Deadly Series, set during a fictional literary festival named the September Tide Festival, a small bow to Daphne’s play September Tide. There are guided walks, cream teas, and rather more corpses than the tourist board would like.

One day I will stand on the Town Quay myself and look out at the estuary. I am quite certain it will feel like coming home.

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Admiration Is Not the Same as Love

And now let me be honest with you, because this series deserves honesty.

I love Beatrix Potter. I love Louisa May Alcott. With Daphne du Maurier, it’s different. I don’t love her. I admire her, enormously, and the distinction matters.

Temple and Alcott were warm rebels. You’d want them at your kitchen table. Daphne, I suspect, would decline the invitation, politely, and go sailing instead. She kept the whole world at arm’s length, and she’d have kept me there too. Which is precisely the point: she never asked to be loved. She asked to be left alone to write, and she defended that request, decade after decade, against her family, her husband’s world, her publishers’ labels and every expectation placed on her.

So here is what I found behind the “romantic novelist” of my bookshelf. A girl who walked out of the most glamorous drawing rooms in London and never looked back. A young woman who sailed alone in the 1920s. A wife who loved her husband but refused his world. A writer who waited twenty years for a house, and turned that longing into Manderley. An author who was filed under romance while quietly writing some of the most unsettling fiction of her century.

Her rebellion never shouted. It simply said no, politely, for sixty years, and went sailing.

I haven’t lost the moody novelist of the Cornish cliffs. I’ve gained a person: stubborn, shy, complicated, and heroically uninterested in what anyone expected of her, including admiration like mine. She would not have cared one bit what I think of her.

Somehow, that only makes me admire her more.

Now tell me: which author surprised you most when you discovered who they really were? I’m still taking notes for the next Unlikely Rebel.

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PS Looking for more remarkable women?

This article is part of my Meet the Unlikely Rebels series, where I explore the lives of extraordinary women who quietly challenged expectations and left a lasting mark on history, literature, and my own imagination.

→ Explore the complete Meet the Unlikely Rebels series here.