I wrote this in early 2007 before her centenary. It's past it's sell-by date. But this is what sparked my Houses in Fiction piece.

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Dame Daphne du Maurier died in 1989; had she lived she would have been a centenarian this year. The middle of three daughters of Muriel and Gerald du Maurier she was born in London on the 13th of May, 1907.

Many of her novels were set in her beloved Cornwall where Cornish families, houses and places became the source of her inspiration. Her works also included short stories, plays, biographies, and memoirs on her father and the du Mauriers. Her autobiography, 'Growing Pains', published in 1977 only dealt with her early years and it has been left to others to describe her life in full. Many of her books became film classics; 'Rebecca', which she also adapted as a play, was even the subject of a radio dramatization by Orson Wells, a 1970s TV serial and the theme for an opera commissioned in the 1980s. She died aged eighty-one at Kilmarth, her final home near Fowey, where her ashes are buried.

Both Daphne’s parents were actors; Muriel gave up the stage before the birth of her third daughter; by then Gerald had become an actor-manager in theatrical management with Frank Curzon at Wyndham’s Theatre. Gerald met his wife in a J M Barrie production in 1902 and was to play a fearsome Captain Hook in Barrie’s Peter Pan with his eldest daughter Angela as Wendy. Barrie, ‘Uncle Jim’ to the du Maurier sisters, wrote Peter Pan for the children of Gerald’s sister.
Her grandfather, George du Maurier, who died before she was born was an artist/illustrator, and a caricaturist on Punch He illustrated novels of Mrs Gaskell, Thomas Hardy and Wilkie Collins and wrote three successful novels himself.

Daphne’s formative years were spent in an theatrical atmosphere full of fantasy. She always wanted to be a boy; her internal conflict with this feeling and her tempestuous relationship with her father as she grew older were to impact on her later writings with a number of her novels using a male narrator. At fourteen her close platonic friendship with a male cousin, 22 years her senior, and her father’s ‘stable’ of young actresses made her sexually aware. At finishing school near Paris, the family slang ‘Venetian’ for lesbian was reflected by her fascination for a French school teacher, later her friend for life, who was said to love her in ‘every conceivable way’. Her books, stories and plays frequently deal with the darker relationships between men and women and have stood the test of time.

Daphne started writing stories at an early age; her uncle, editor of the Bystander (later absorbed by the Tatler), published her story, 'And Now to God the Father', before she was to write her first novel. By this time the du Mauriers had discovered Cornwall when they holidayed at Fowey; in 1926 Gerald bought Ferryside, the first Cornish house at which Daphne was to live and write.

Cornwall’s places and families were to figure prominently in Daphne’s most famous works. Her first novel, 'The Loving Spirit', was written at Ferryside, its inspiration had been her discovering the wreck Jane Slade along Pont Creek near Fowey and some old letters of the Slade family. The title was taken from a line in a poem by Emily Brontë; much later Daphne was to write a biography of Emily’s bother Branwell and include in her 1967 book, 'Vanishing Cornwall', a chapter on the Brontë’s Cornish connection.

The publication of 'The Loving Spirit' in 1931 gained her recognition and public admiration, and attracted the attention of a young Grenadier officer, Major Frederick Browning who had won the DSO in the 1914 – 1918 war and had received the French Croix de Guerre, before becoming the adjutant of Sandhurst in 1924. Nicknamed ‘Boy’ he became ‘Tommy’ to Daphne; they married in July 1932 at Lanteglos church by Fowey and honeymooned on Tommy’s boat at Frenchman’s Creek.

The 1930’s was a prolific time for Daphne. In this time she had two daughters but nothing stopped her writing three more novels one of which, her fourth, was 'Jamaica Inn', the story of Cornish wreckers led by a parson’ based on the inn that still exists on Bodmin Moor. This was in addition to a biography, 'Gerald. A Portrait', of her father, knighted in 1922, who died in 1934, and 'The du Mauriers' which began with the story of Daphne’s great-great- grandmother, Mary Anne Clarke, mistress of the Duke of York, and about her grandfather George and the French origins of the Busson du Mauriers.

'The du Mauriers' had been written during a period in Alexandria where her husband’s regiment had been posted. She went home to England in 1937 to have Flavia, a sister for Tessa who had been born in 1933, before, on her return, she began to write what was to become, in 1938, one of the world’s major publishing successes.

The opening of 'Rebecca', ‘Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again’, introduced Manderley, a forbidding house with an equally forbidding, black-clad Mrs Danvers as its housekeeper. The fictional Manderley was modelled on Milton House, near Peterborough the ancestral home of the Fitzwilliam family and the house and gardens of the Cornish Menabilly. Belonging to the Rashleigh family, Menabilly, to become the home for Daphne and her husband from 1943 to 1969, its history and grounds also provided input to novels later than 'Rebecca'.

'Rebecca', the film released in 1940, directed by Alfred Hitchcock, starred Laurence Olivier as Maxim de Winter and Joan Fontaine as his unnamed second wife. The ending to the film differed to the book as, by then, the American, Hays Office Production Code dictated what could and could not be screened. The death of Maxim’s first wife Rebecca was altered from murder to an accidental death. The earlier film of 'Jamaica Inn' also directed by Hitchcock in 1939 also had had its ending altered due to the restrictions imposed by the Hays Production Code - the leader of the wreckers could not be seen to be a man of the cloth and was changed to be the local squire. Daphne did not appreciated these changes.

In the 1940s Dapne was even more prolific. After the birth of her son Christian (Kits) Daphne produced four more novels and several volumes of short stories. The first of the novels was 'Frenchman's Creek' which Daphne described as the only romantic novel she ever wrote. This is ironic since critics and public alike have nearly always considered her to be a writer of romantic stories. She departed from the Cornish theme of her earlier novels with her next, 'Hungry Hill', an epic family saga set in Ireland based on the ancestors of her friend Christopher Puxley, with whom Daphne was to have an affair.

The third novel of the '40s was the first she wrote at Menabilly. 'The King's General', set during the English Civil war, prompted by the discovery, during alterations to Menabilly in the 1820s, of a walled-up skeleton thought to have been a Cavalier, tells the story of the love between Richard Grenville, The King's General and Royalist Honor Harris, one of du Maurier's strongest heroines.

Daphne’s ninth novel, 'The Parasites' published in 1949, was the first she wrote in a writing hut built in the grounds of Menabilly. Set mainly in London, Paris and a family country estate, its theatrical background reflected a familiar lifestyle to her own, with her upbringing incorporated in the storyline.

The first of three novels in the 1950s was to be Daphne’s last ‘Cornish’ novel. 'My Cousin Rachel' was a major success both as a novel and as a film with Richard Burton and Olivia de Havilland. Whether Rachel really poisoned her second husband Ambrose in Italy is never really answered. The story, told by Philip Ashley, Ambrose’s younger brother, recounts Philips suspicions surrounding Ambrose’s death and the way in which he, in turn, becomes infatuated with Rachel, the former Countess Sangaletti. Rachel falls to her death at what had been Ambrose and Philips Cornish home, until Philip had given it to her when he, at 25, became independent of his guardian. The sunken garden where Rachel died is based on the sunken garden at ‘Daphne’s’ Menabilly.

'Mary Anne', Daphne’s next novel tells the story of her great-great-grandmother’s life and how she became the mistress of the Duke of York in the early 1800s. 'Mary Anne was dedicated to her great-great-grandmother and to Gertrude Lawrence', ‘who was to have acted the part on the stage’ and who had died in 1952 two years before 'Mary Anne' came out. Gertrude had starred as Stella Martyn in Daphne’s play 'September Tide' in 1949. Stella was a heavily disguised Ellen Doubleday, the wife of her American publisher, with whom she had a lasting friendship and which, not through want on Daphne’ part, did not turn into the physical love which developed between Daphne and Gertrude.

Daphne’s long-running play, 'The Years Between', had been filmed in 1947, but it was her short story, 'The Birds', that next caught the public’s attention in Hitchcock’s famous film. The story, rewritten by Hitchcock, for his film, was taken from 'The Apple Tree', which, published in 1953, had been described as a short novel and short stories. By the end of the 1950s Daphne’s output of short stories from her Menabilly years was effectively over.

The film of 'The Scapegoat', Daphne’s last novel of the ‘50s, starring Alec Guinness and Bette Davis had been in Davis’s words ‘disastrous’ and disappointing to Daphne. Agatha Christie is said to have helped her with 'The Scapegoat' which, set in France, is about a quiet Englishman who meets his double, a French aristocrat who tricks him into assuming his identity.

The idea for Daphne’s 'Jamaica Inn' in 1936 had sprung from a visit there that she had undertaken with Sir Arthur Quiller Couch and his daughter Foy. At Foy’s suggestion, in 1962, she was to complete 'Castle Dor', one of Sir Arthur’s unfinished novels, before producing 'The Glass Blowers', a family saga of 18th century French craftsmen, the following year. 'The Flight of The Falcon', based in Italy, came out in 1965 – the same year that her husband Tommy died.

Their marriage had been through some turbulent times and both Daphne and Tommy had indulged in extra-marital affairs. Tommy’s war experiences on the Western Front in World War I effected him throughout his life together with the loss of life at the Airborne landing at Arnhem; this operation had been dubbed as ‘a bridge too far’ in 1944 by Tommy during its planning. The treatment of Tommy, played by Dirk Bogard, in Richard Attenborough’s 1977 film of Cornelius Ryan’s book 'A Bridge Too Far' greatly upset Daphne and her family.

Daphne was to suffer a further blow when, in 1969 the year she was made a DBE, the Rashleighs wanted to return to Menabilly; despite all the money she had spent on its restoration Daphne was forced to accept a move to its dower house, Kilmarth, where she was to live until her death.

Prior to Tommy’s death Daphne had had published 'The Treasury of du Maurier Short Stories' and a biography, 'The Infernal World of Branwell Bronte'. After Tommy’s death she worked with her son Kits, who took the photographs, on 'Vanishing Cornwall' (1967). Her novel, 'The House on The Strand' published in 1969, was to be her penultimate. Kilmarth provided some of the inspiration for this book set in Cornwall in the 14th and 20th century.

Kilmarth’s previous tenant, a professor of science, had left behind embryos and other specimens which were the trigger for Daphne’s stories in 'Not After Midnight'. 'Don’t Look Now', a story of supernatural and occult forces which led to a violent death in Venice, became the cult film classic of 1973 and the last of her works to be filmed. Her last novel 'Rule Britannia', two biographies on Sir Francis Bacon, 'Echoes from the Macabre', 'Selected Stories' and her autobiography were published in the 1970s, with 'The Rebecca Notebook' and a further volume of short stories her last works in 1981.

Subsequently, she became increasing unwell, losing her ability to write and suffering memory loss. A virtual recluse at Kilmarth, she died there on 19 April 1989.

The Daphne du Maurier Festival of Arts and Literature held each year at Fowey on dates in May including her birthday is preceded this year by an International Centenary Conference, a fitting tribute to one of Britain’s great enduring writers.