More Daphne

The excuse of the recent edition of The Daphne du Maurier Companion, edited by Helen Taylor (check this other recent article) is generating several articles about her life and work. Recently we posted about an article in The Guardian. Now it's Michèle Roberts (author of Reader I Married Him and practising Brontëite) who writes about her in The Times:

LIKE ITS GREAT PREDECESSOR Jane Eyre, Rebecca sends thrills down teenage readers’ spines. Ditto My Cousin Rachel, Jamaica Inn, Frenchman’s Creek. Most of us first read Daphne du Maurier in our teens, contemplating adulthood, and that makes sense. She dramatises conflict, rebellion, the wish for escape. She seems to write out of an inner tomboy desperate to go on having adventures, desperate not to dwindle into conventional domesticated femininity.

Not everyone approves of girls just wanting to have fun, just as not everyone approves of women writers articulating dissatisfaction and dissent. As we approach the centenary of her birth, du Maurier is still often dismissed by a chorus line of critics, as she was in her own lifetime (she died in 1989), as merely a good storyteller, merely a scribbler of historical and gothic romances for foolish women. These blinkered critics cannot see that women may write and read romances to explore anxieties about marriage and motherhood, not simply to dream of rescue. (Read more)

The Scotsman also features an article about Daphne where the Brontës appear:

The serious books she wrote - her biographies of Branwell Brontë and an ancestor, Mary Anne Clarke, who was the Duke of York's mistress - failed to give her the critical acclaim she wanted, while her most popular novel, Rebecca, was viewed for many years in literary magazines and journals as a kind of sub-Jane Eyre effort, a Gothic melodrama. (Lesley MacDonald)

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