Daphne du Maurier and her Sisters

And, if I’d had my way,

She would have been, a boy.

My very slender one

So feminine and fair, so fresh and sweet,

So full of fun and womanly deceit.

My tender one

Who seems to dream her life away alone.

A dainty girl

But always well attired

And loves to be admired

Where ever she may be, and wants

To be the being who enchants

Because she has been born a girl.

And sometimes in the turmoil of the day

I pause, and think my darling may

Be one of those who will

For good or ill

Remain a girl for ever and be still

A Girl.

This was a poem full of complex meaning when written by an adored and influential father for his favourite daughter. Daphne stood on the threshold of adulthood, confused by her identity and struggling to find a sense of herself in the world. Gerald’s elegiac words could only compound that confusion. He regretted the son that might have been, and celebrated the lovely daughter whose gender made her second best. But she was lovely only as long as she remained a girl and managed somehow not to grow to womanhood. Becoming a woman meant losing so much of value: joy in action, beauty of form, simplicity, freedom, integrity of the self.

At a time when women had been risking their lives in wars abroad, and at home taken on the Establishment and won the first concessions in their battle for the vote, Gerald’s view of the roles of men and women was old-fashioned and stultifying. In the poem Daphne as a boy is full of action, a hero figure, ‘brave of heart’ and spurred to ‘deeds of daring and much fame’. On the other hand, her place in the world as a girl is passive, her looks and the effects she has on others paramount – ‘so fresh and sweet’, prone to ‘womanly deceit’, ‘dainty’ and ‘well attired’. Muriel was the role model for this kind of woman, and Daphne did not want to be like her at all.

Daphne and Jeanne were happiest in boy’s shorts, thick socks and stout shoes. They did not care about their hair or the grime on their faces. Daphne hated her white knees after a winter of being covered up and would rub dirt into them each spring to reclaim her tomboy self. Their prettiness belied the masculine characters that swaggered in their imaginations and peopled their games. The stereotypical sporting hero Eric Avon was not based on the kind of men who loomed largest in their lives like their father and the romanticised view of their grandfather. These immensely successful men were artists and darlings of the drawing room, not men made on the sports field or battleground. In fact, George in later life had lost much of his sight and was in thrall to his womenfolk, and Gerald’s love of gossip about friends’ private lives, tireless practical joking, and enjoyment of the company of women made him an exceptional entertainer with an effete and dandified air, rather than an all-conquering hero. His propensity to go to pieces if separated for too long from Muriel also disqualified him from the square-jawed masculine ideal. In the du Maurier household, where the women were capable and robust and the men were pampered and indulged, sexual stereotypes were not the norm.

Unlike her sisters, Angela did not want to be a boy. She was happy enough to be a girl even though she bitterly regretted she was not beautiful and therefore felt handicapped in the great marriage game that her family considered a woman’s natural destiny. She too was afraid of growing up, but it was her emotionalism that bothered her, the embarrassment of her crushes and the torrent of feeling that they unleashed. The young Angela was sensitive and serious and hated being teased, the default position in her family. She was also ignorant and afraid of the sexual male, that scary other that had grown sinister in her imagination as a result of early shocks and her inadequate education:

The business of growing older, into ‘double figures’, I disliked. I was unhappy when I was told I was too old to wear my nice white socks in the summertime, and made to wear horrible brown stockings … one was a fish out of water, too young to listen to sophisticated conversation, at the same time not wishing to play cricket on the lawn with younger sisters and their friends … pulled both ways, misunderstood at times by young and old alike, and not always understanding oneself.

Angela’s literalness of mind and the inadvertent hurt caused by adults who did not understand was illustrated by an unhappy infatuation she never forgot. At weekends, Cannon Hall was filled with various stage people: one Sunday, even Rudolph Valentino came to lunch, to general excitement, as too did Gary Cooper, the embodiment of Hollywood star power. There were the long-established acting friends like Gladys Cooper, Viola Tree and John Barrymore, and any number of glamorous others who passed through their lives. But in 1919, when Angela was fifteen, she was taken by her parents to see a magnificent production of Rostand’s Cyrano de Bergerac. Robert Loraine – ‘Bobby’ to them all – was playing the title role. From then on Angela was smitten. Only three years younger than Gerald du Maurier, he was an actor-manager like him and the theatre he successfully managed was the Criterion. A fine actor, he was usually cast as the romantic lead, and even went on to tackle Shakespeare. But he was much more than this, a true heroic figure. A pioneering aviator, he had only just survived as a flying ace in the Great War and been decorated for his bravery with an MC and DSO. Angela had a photograph of him in his Royal Flying Corps uniform and she kissed it every night, along with her picture of the Prince of Wales.

Bobby had a mellifluous voice and it amused him to spout the most rousing bits of Shakespeare under Angela’s bedroom window at night. Inevitably, Angela, by now sixteen, began to dream of marrying him. The age gap seemed no barrier: perhaps the fact that he was her father’s generation was a reassurance to her. Then with the thoughtlessness of adulthood, Bobby hijacked her fantasy by casually saying to Gerald at one of their family Sunday lunches at Cannon Hall, ‘the day will come I expect when I shall ask you for Angela’s hand’. Given her youth, innocence and supercharged romantic nature, it was not unreasonable of her to imagine the deed was done and she would be the next Mrs Robert Loraine, with accompanying beautiful house, enchanting children, dogs, the whole caboodle. (She admitted she daydreamed about weddings and babies’ names, without sex coming into any of this at all.) But Angela had misunderstood Bobby’s manly banter with her father, and he had misunderstood how serious she was and how tender her heart. ‘The day never came, and he suddenly appeared with an exquisite wife very little older than me (which made one’s frustrated misery more acute).’

It may have been on this occasion that Angela, in the depths of despair and with pure melodrama running in her veins, had jumped up onto a wall running along the Embankment, declaring she would cast herself into the Thames. Luckily she was with the imperturbable Tod who replied, ‘Not now, dear, it’s teatime.’

The sisters, unable to confide in their parents, turned to each other. Daphne, struggling with deeper existential questions, turned to Tod. Their exasperated mother would complain that she could never get one sister to side with her against another as they always stood up for each other. Angela was incapable of keeping her tumultuous emotions to herself and so Daphne, already a confidante, was party to all her upset and disappointment. Daphne at thirteen had just sought refuge from the adult world in the creation of her boy-self Eric; no wonder that she retreated further when she observed the incomprehensible behaviour towards women of even the nicest men. Her body may have betrayed her by beginning to turn her into a woman, but her diary for that year was still childlike, full of cricket matches and the birthday party she gave for her teddy bear. Jeanne at nine, the favoured companion of their mother, was very much the baby and sheltered from even this incursion of the adult world.

The following summer Angela would see her longing for love thwarted at every turn while her younger sister, without seeking it, once again became effortlessly the centre of admiration and, this time, of male desire. In the middle of the family seaside holiday, fourteen-year-old Daphne glanced up from paddling and shrimping to find her much older cousin, Geoffrey, looking at her with a strange smile. Something about the smile caught the girl’s attention and made her heart beat faster. She had never felt this way before. She smiled back. She knew nothing of the facts of life and was completely uninterested in the mechanics of sex and would remain so, she recalled, until she was eighteen. But in that one moment, Daphne’s innocent world of cricket and reading and making up stories was intruded on by a grown-up male old enough to be her father.

It was 1921 and the du Mauriers had rented a house in Thurlestone in south Devon, and as usual other guests had been asked to join them. Cousin Geoffrey, the elder brother of Gerald Millar, who had so appealed to Angela when she was younger, was divorced from his first wife. This had caused a scandal amongst the aunts and uncles who considered divorce something that should never happen in a family like theirs; ‘one might have thought a national calamity was about to occur’.

This raffishly good-looking thirty-six-year-old actor had subsequently remarried and had brought his second wife with him on this visit to his cousins. But his roving eye had been caught by the attractive sight of his young cousin paddling in the sea, still so obviously just a pretty child but on the threshold of sexual awakening, and he smiled.

Daphne never forgot the peculiar excitement caused by that secret smile. She could not understand it but liked the physical sensation and the sense that she was special and there was a precious understanding between them. When all the children were sunbathing on the lawn, with rugs over their knees, Geoffrey came and lay beside her and under the blanket reached for her hand. The effect on her was electrifying and unsettling; something dormant was awoken in her. ‘No kisses. No hint of the sexual impulse he undoubtedly felt and indeed admitted … but instead, on my part at least, a reaching out for a relationship that was curiously akin to what I felt for D[addy].’ Daphne found this frisson with Geoffrey even more exciting because it was wrong and especially because it was secret, hidden from her pathologically possessive and suspicious father and right under the nose of Geoffrey’s unsuspecting wife. ‘Nothing, in a life of seventy years, has ever surpassed that first awakening of an instinct within myself. The touch of that hand on mine. And the instinctive knowledge that nobody must know.’

Geoffrey’s behaviour could be seen as a subtle seduction by a much older, worldly-wise man of a vulnerable cousin, still a child who should have been safe in his company. In a classic ploy of the seducer, he told her he had already grown disenchanted with his new wife and now, because of his feelings for Daphne, no longer wished to go on tour to America at the end of the year. There was little doubt that the whole flirtation that summer was a deliberate manipulation of a young girl’s emotions to gratify his egotistical needs. The loading of responsibility for his dubious behaviour on her child’s shoulders was cowardly, and distorted her sense of power and integrity. The intrusion of a confusing adult world into her child’s one, lived largely in the imagination, certainly unsettled Daphne and absorbed much of her thoughts for the rest of the year, uniting her to him in an indissoluble bond of rebellious conspiracy that was to last a lifetime. Daphne loved to think of herself as daring and she also enjoyed a growing sense of the power she had over others. Neither was she averse to causing her father anxiety and jealousy – it all reinforced her central importance in his life.

Her recognition of the similarity of the feelings she felt for Geoffrey and those for her own father informs one of the enduring themes of her fiction: that of incest and taboo. But for Daphne, always living more vividly in the mind than the body, the idea of incest would come to exert an intellectual fascination that grew, she explained, from her realisation that we are attracted to people who are familiar to us, that family provide the real romance of life.

Years after the encounter in south Devon, when she was twenty-one and her obsession with Geoffrey had cooled to an amused flirtatious affection – although he remained as smitten with her as ever – she had fun teasing him by meeting him in the drawing room at Cannon Hall to say goodnight, dressed only in her pyjamas. With her parents in bed on the floor above, she allowed him passionately to kiss her for the first – and last – time. Having not been kissed by a man before, apart from her father, she found it ‘nice and pleasant’, but, with a startling lack of understanding of human sexuality and empathy for the feelings of another, wished Geoffrey could be more light-hearted. He had finally managed some intimacy after years of secretive smiling, furtive knee-stroking and hand-holding, with the object of his forbidden desire prancing about in her pyjamas, at night, and she complained he was rather overexcited.

‘Men are so odd,’ she wrote in her diary, ‘it would be awful if he got properly keyed-up.’

Daphne added another peculiarly detached statement: ‘He is very sweet and lovable. The strange thing is [kissing Geoffrey] is so like kissing D[addy],’ and went on to surmise that perhaps their family was like the incestuous Borgias, with her as the fatally attractive Lucretia. But then this was a girl who liked to shock and given how underwhelmed she was by Geoffrey’s kisses, likening them to Daddy’s did not suggest unbridled fatherly or daughterly passion. Any incestuous impulse between father and daughter was more likely to reside in his overbearing emotional demands on her and her answering fascination with him, united with resentment and excitement at how important she was to him. The growing realisation of her power over others through her attractiveness and detachment was thrilling.

While Daphne, only just into her teens, was quickening their cousin’s pulse simply by being there, Angela recalled yet another example of her own lack of beauty and physical presence. She was seventeen when she accompanied her ten-year-old sister Jeanne to a children’s party in a grand house in London. Dressed in a sober blue coat and skirt, and feeling rather overweight and shy, she was mistaken by the butler for a children’s nurse and shepherded in with the other visiting servants. But ‘the nurses were far too high and mighty to bother with me’,

and, although short and appearing younger than her age, Angela was not about to become one of the children for the afternoon, so she sat in lonely exile for hours until the party was over and she could escort Jeanne home. She made a joke of it, but these humiliations and unflattering comparisons undermined the self-esteem of a young woman who already felt inadequate and in some fundamental way unworthy of love.

The summer of 1921 was clouded for the family by another tragedy that befell their ill-fated Llewelyn Davies cousins. The eldest of them, George, taken into the care of Uncle Jim Barrie after he was orphaned, had been killed in the war. Michael, the fourth brother, and the main inspiration for Barrie’s Peter Pan, was now twenty-one and a sensitive poetic young man, a troubled undergraduate at Oxford University. On a perfectly fine and warm afternoon in May, he and his best friend Rupert Buxton drowned together in a still bathing pool in the countryside just outside Oxford. They appeared to have died in each other’s arms, in what may have been a double suicide, but no one could be sure. Saving the families’ feelings was paramount, and the coroner declared a verdict of accidental death. But this did not soften the blow of two immensely promising young men dying in mysterious and harrowing circumstances. There is no mention as to how the du Maurier sisters took the news except for Daphne who recorded it in her diary (‘how dreadful’) along with the information that their youngest Llewelyn Davies cousin Nico came to stay before the funeral.

Contrary to some suggestions that J. M. Barrie not only ruined the boys’ lives but also had some malign hold over Daphne’s, it was noticeable that in her early diaries, when his influence was meant to have been intense, his name did not once appear. In fact the du Maurier sisters seem not to have seen very much of him or the Llewelyn Davies cousins either, once the boys’ mother had died. When Peter, the third eldest brother, came to lunch at Cannon Hall in 1925, Daphne wrote in her diary that she had not seen him for years. Barrie’s creation, Peter Pan, however, continued to hold a magnetic attraction for them all.

Holidays apart, life continued at Cannon Hall with lessons during the week, wild games for Daphne and Jeanne in the garden, and paperchases on the heath – with Daphne as the paper-scattering hare. The glamorous friends of their parents filled the house at weekends, when the du Maurier girls were expected to practise their social skills and be attendant maidens and entertainers. Both Angela and Jeanne were musical, a gift that could be traced back to the du Maurier ancestors where grandfather George and his father were known for their beautiful tenor voices which would bring an audience to tears. All three girls learned to play the piano – as well-brought-up girls did – but only Angela and Jeanne persevered into adulthood. Jeanne was particularly talented and continued to play all her life. In the du Maurier household, playing the piano was not allowed to be a private pleasure. Muriel insisted the girls play for her friends after lunch, and she refused to let them use sheet music, it all had to be from memory. This became a misery particularly for Angela who had to stumble through some standby like the Moonlight Sonata in front of a long-suffering audience, accompanied by her mother’s audible intakes of breath at every wrong note, of which there were many.

She much preferred practising with their enthusiastic music mistress, who would come to the house and inspire Angela and Jeanne to play exciting duets, the Ride of the Valkyries being one memorable favourite. In fact her visits sparked both girls’ love of music. Angela’s love of opera and of Wagner began with these lessons.

At sixteen, Angela had a good singing voice and dreamed of being an operatic diva. She had no ambitions to be an actress but longed to sing, and as nothing but the most romantic roles attracted her, she wanted to be a soprano. This proved to be difficult as she was naturally a good contralto, but Daddy was paying, so a succession of well-regarded singing teachers attempted to turn her into a less good mezzo-soprano and finally into a reedy excuse for a soprano. ‘My future at Covent Garden was soon doomed to a still-birth.’

This frustration of a musical career was a lasting regret to her but her love of music was to last a lifetime. Ballet too was a lasting pleasure, introduced to her when she was fifteen by one of the most beautiful women in England, Lady Diana Cooper, or Lady Diana Manners as she was then, who whisked her off to the Diaghilev season at the Alhambra, a spectacular Moorish-inspired theatre dominating the east side of Leicester Square. ‘I was her slave for life,’

was Angela’s characteristically effusive reaction to this thrilling experience.

By 1921, Jeanne was becoming more than just her mother’s pet and Daphne’s willing sidekick in her make-believe worlds. She was not only developing into a talented artist and pianist, she was also growing surprisingly good at tennis, and would soon be entering tournaments. Photographs showed this pretty girl growing into a sturdy, strong-limbed youngster whom Daphne nicknamed ‘The Madam’. She wrote to Tod that Jeanne had grown upwards and outwards: ‘her legs resemble what a stout Glaxo baby may eventually grow into, and she will probably be ten feet each way! Her taste in literature takes after Angela, she has just finished “The Great Husband Hunt”!

which she gloated over.’

Jeanne retained for many years the alternative identity of David Dampier, schoolboy sports star, given to her by Daphne. Many years later her partner in life, Noël Welch, who knew all three grown-up sisters very well, commented that Jeanne, ‘the youngest, would have made the best boy … She has never got over not being able to lower a telescope from her eye with a suitably dramatic or casual remark, her feet apart, her square shoulders, so elegant on a horse, braced against the wind.’

In another letter, Daphne wished she could be as placid and happy as her youngest sister and was disconcerted that she felt bored with life before it had even begun. She was already writing a book about a boy called Maurice who suffered from her own sense of dislocation from humanity and who identifies with the freedom of the natural world, for trees and water and sky. The whole story is imbued with a Peter Pan-like longing for something unattainable. Even the father figure whom Maurice finds to console his widowed mother is an amalgamation of her own father and Barrie, a man who had never grown up.