Literary critics have sometimes berated du Maurier's works for not being "intellectually heavyweight" like those of
George Eliot or
Iris Murdoch, but to fully understand her importance in English literature one must look first to the era in which she wrote. At the onset of her career, with the horrors of the
First World War still a fresh memory and the storm-clouds of the
Second World War rumbling on the horizon, her novels offered much-needed glamour, romanticism and above all, escapism. But by the 1950s, when the socially and politically critical "angry young men" were in vogue, her writing was felt by some to belong to a bygone age of fiction. Today she has been reappraised as a first-rate storyteller, a mistress of suspense: her ability to recreate a sense of place is much admired, and her work remains popular worldwide. For several decades she was the number one author for library book borrowings.
The novel
Rebecca, which has been adapted for stage and screen on several occasions, is generally regarded as her masterpiece. One of her strongest influences here was
Jane Eyre by
Charlotte Brontë. Her fascination with the
Brontë family is also apparent in
The Infernal World of Branwell Brontë, her biography of the troubled elder brother to the Brontë girls. The fact that their mother had been Cornish no doubt added to her interest.
Other notable works include
The Scapegoat,
The House on the Strand, and
The King's General. The latter is set in the middle of the
first and
second English Civil Wars. Though written from the Royalist perspective of her native Cornwall, it gives a fairly neutral view of this period of history and is written with a great flair for that era.
In addition to
Rebecca, several of her other novels have been adapted for the screen, including
Jamaica Inn,
Frenchman's Creek,
Hungry Hill and
My Cousin Rachel (1951). The Hitchcock film
The Birds (1963) is based on a treatment of one of her short stories, as is the film
Don't Look Now (1973). Of the films, du Maurier often complained that the only ones she liked were
Alfred Hitchcock's Rebecca and
Nicolas Roeg's Don't Look Now. Hitchcock's treatment of
Jamaica Inn involved a complete re-write of the ending in order to accommodate the ego of its star,
Charles Laughton. Du Maurier also felt that
Olivia de Havilland was totally wrong as the (anti-)heroine in
My Cousin Rachel.
Frenchman's Creek fared rather better with its lavish Technicolor sets and costumes, though du Maurier later regretted her choice of
Alec Guinness as the lead in the film of
The Scapegoat which she partly financed.
Du Maurier was often categorised as a "romantic novelist" (a term she deplored), though most of her novels, with the notable exception of
Frenchman's Creek, are quite different from the stereotypical format of a
Georgette Heyer or
Barbara Cartland novel. Du Maurier's novels rarely have a happy ending, and her brand of romanticism is often at odds with the sinister overtones and shadows of the paranormal she so favoured. In this light, she has more in common with the "
sensation novels" of
Wilkie Collins et al., which she admired.
Indeed, it was in her short stories that she was able to give free rein to the harrowing and terrifying side of her imagination; "
The Birds", Don't Look Now,
The Apple Tree and
The Blue Lenses are exquisitely crafted tales of terror which shocked and surprised her audience in equal measure. Perhaps more than at any other time, du Maurier was anxious as to how her bold new writing style would be received, not just with her readers (and to some extent her critics, though by then she had grown wearily accustomed to their often luke-warm reviews) but her immediate circle of family and friends.
In later life she wrote
non-fiction, including several biographies which were well-received. This no doubt came from a deep-rooted desire to be accepted as a serious writer, comparing herself to her close literary neighbour,
A. L. Rowse, the celebrated historian and essayist, who lived a few miles away from her house near
Fowey.
Also of interest are the "family" novels/biographies which du Maurier wrote of her own ancestry, of which
Gerald, the biography of her father, was most lauded. Later she wrote
The Glass-Blowers, which traces her
French ancestry and gives a vivid depiction of the
French Revolution. The du Mauriers is a sequel of sorts, describing the somewhat problematic ways in which the family moved from France to England in the 19th century and finally
Mary Anne, a novel based on the life of a notable, and infamous, English ancestor—her great-grandmother
Mary Anne Clarke, former mistress of
Frederick, Duke of York.
Her final novels reveal just how far her writing style had evolved;
The House on the Strand (1969) combines elements of "mental time-travel", a tragic love-affair in 14th century Cornwall, and the dangers of using mind-altering drugs. Her final novel,
Rule Britannia, written post-
Vietnam, plays with the resentment of English people in general and Cornish people in particular at the increasing dominance of the USA.
She died at the age of 81 at her home in Cornwall, the region which had been the setting for many of her books. In accordance with her wishes, her body was
cremated and her ashes were scattered on the cliffs near her home.
In late 2006 a previously unknown work titled
And His Letters Grew Colder was discovered. This was estimated to have been written in the late 1920s, and takes the form of a series of letters tracing an adulterous passionate affair from initial ardour to deflated acrimony.
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