Daphne du Maurier

Daphne du Maurier (1907–1989) was a British novelist and short story writer whose work created a distinctive blend of Gothic romance, psychological suspense, and Cornish atmosphere that influenced the thriller genre throughout the twentieth century. Born in London into a theatrical family — her grandfather was the novelist George du Maurier, her father the actor-manager Gerald du Maurier — she was educated partly in Paris and spent much of her adult life in Cornwall, which became the landscape of her most important fiction. Her first novel, The Loving Spirit (1931), brought her early recognition, but it was Jamaica Inn (1936), set on the Cornish moors, that established her popular reputation. Rebecca (1938), her masterpiece, is narrated by an unnamed young woman who marries the wealthy widower Maxim de Winter and is haunted by the presence of his first wife at his Cornish estate Manderley; it became one of the bestselling novels of the twentieth century and the basis of Alfred Hitchcock's 1940 film. My Cousin Rachel (1951), Frenchman's Creek (1941), and The House on the Strand (1969) followed, along with the short story collections that produced 'The Birds' (the basis of Hitchcock's 1963 film) and 'Don't Look Now.' Du Maurier was created Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1969. She resisted conventional categorization throughout her life — she saw herself as neither a romance writer nor a thriller writer but as an explorer of psychological ambiguity — and her reputation has grown steadily in the decades since her death as literary critics have taken her work more seriously.