Jane Dunn - Daphne du Maurier and her Sisters

Dedication

In celebration of all sisters,

and particularly mine:

Kari, Izzy, B, Trish and Sue

(and our outnumbered brothers Marko and Andy)

CONTENTS

TITLE PAGE DAPHNE DU MAURIER AND HER SISTERS The Hidden Lives of Piffy, Bird and Bing JANE DUNN

DEDICATION Dedication In celebration of all sisters, and particularly mine: Kari, Izzy, B, Trish and Sue (and our outnumbered brothers Marko and Andy)

DU MAURIER FAMILY TREE DU MAURIER FAMILY TREE

PREFACE

1. The Curtain Rises

2. Lessons in Disguise

3. The Dancing Years

4. Love and Losing

5. In Pursuit of Happiness

6. Set on Adventure

7. Stepping Out

8. A Transfiguring Flame

9. Fruits of War

10. A Mind in Flight

11. A Kind of Reckoning

12. Heading for Home

AFTERWORD

PICTURE SECTION

FOOTNOTES

NOTES

ILLUSTRATIONS

SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

BY THE SAME AUTHOR

COPYRIGHT

ABOUT THE PUBLISHER

But it is very foolish to ask questions about any young ladies – about any three sisters just grown up; for one knows, without being told, exactly what they are – all very accomplished and pleasing, and one very pretty. There is a beauty in every family. It is a regular thing. Two play on the piano-forte, and one on the harp – and all sing – Or would sing if they were taught – or sing all the better for not being taught – or something like it.

JANE AUSTEN, Mansfield Park

JANE AUSTEN UNDERSTOOD about sisters. Mansfield Park and Persuasion seethe with them. Pride and Prejudice is as much about the affection, rivalry and vexation of sisters as it is about the complicated progress of true love for Jane and Elizabeth with Bingley and Darcy. Jane Austen shared a bedroom with her elder sister Cassandra all her life and they relied entirely on each other’s love and support. There is something infinitely touching about their relationship, and tragic too, for Cassandra lived on alone for twenty-eight years after her younger sister died.

In biography, families are the soil out of which character grows, and one of the richest composts is the relationship of sisters. They are ever fascinating, cast from the same mould yet struggling for difference, brought up in the same family yet each with a childhood unique to herself. For good and ill, the sibling bond lasts a lifetime, longer than any other relationship with parents, partners or children, and it is sisters who weave the most complex webs of love and loyalty, resentment and hurt. Adults can turn sisters against each other by cruel comparisons and overt favouritism, as happened in the lifelong feud, continuing into their nineties, between the star of the film of Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca , Joan Fontaine, and her elder sister Olivia de Havilland, who landed the starring role in Daphne’s other great blockbuster, My Cousin Rachel . When sisters’ affections turn sour it can be deadly, for each knows the family’s secrets. More often, however, sisters are a foil and support to each other, a source of inspiration and close conspiracy; the safety net encouraging flight and breaking a fall.

Daphne du Maurier was fascinated by the Brontë siblings and identified with them all, but she jokingly hoped she and her sisters might emulate Charlotte, Emily and Anne one day, if only she could get her artist sister to write too. A bevy of sisters is more than the sum of its parts and it is to this protean relationship that I, as a biographer, like to turn. The first pair I explored was Virginia Woolf and her artist sister Vanessa Bell. This was an archetypal relationship of passionate dependence and rivalry, ultimately transfigured into self-sacrificing love, remarkably well delineated in the sisters’ own letters, Virginia’s novels and Vanessa’s portraits. I followed Virginia & Vanessa with other biographies that featured prominently sisters, daughters and female cousins. Then, with this book, another set of sisters drew my attention.

For most of my life I had been unaware that Daphne du Maurier, author of so many stories that had gripped my young self, had any sisters at all. To find that she had two, her elder sister Angela a writer like herself, and her younger, Jeanne, a painter, piqued my interest. To have a sister’s fame so eclipse the others was psychologically interesting. Even more intriguing, however, was to find how different were the characters and lives of all three du Maurier sisters, yet how strongly imprinted with family values, bonded to each other in their desire to live in close proximity in Cornwall – with Jeanne eventually settling over the border in Dartmoor.

In writing the story of Vanessa Bell and Virginia Woolf I had set out to try and convey, as far as possible, their lives and thoughts in their own words. I hoped to do the same with the du Maurier sisters and was gratified to find how many of Daphne’s letters existed, and how candid and full of interest they were. She had also written a memoir of herself when young, based on the early diaries that she subsequently embargoed. Daphne’s letters are so rich, expressive and funny that they rival Nancy Mitford’s for wit and brio. All three du Maurier sisters wrote excellent letters: conversational, lively with news and comment and a great deal of humour, but Angela’s and Jeanne’s have been largely destroyed or withheld.

Angela was a prolific writer of letters all her long life. She had many friends and acquaintances, but when she was old it seems that she wrote to her closest friends and asked them to destroy her letters. She had already burnt all her love letters, she explained to one of her past lovers, whose letters she had decided to keep. She also could not bring herself to burn her love poems to various important women in her life. For Angela, her deepest feelings and what made her happy in life, were in conflict with her desire to keep up appearances. She learnt early to dissemble to her parents. This conflict became more marked as she grew older, living within a close community in Fowey in Cornwall, where she was held in respect as ‘Miss Angela’, and attached to an Anglo-Catholic Church unsympathetic to any nonconformity in faith or life.

Despite this attempt to obscure her true self, two extrovert autobiographies, if read carefully, are full of hints of a larger life, a more independent and courageous attitude to love, than one might ever suspect from the conventional face she chose to present to the world. She did not want to be known for her guise as maiden aunt who had missed out on love. There had been much more to her than her Pekinese dogs and the roles of dutiful daughter, dependable friend and stalwart of Church and community. I hope this exploration of her life is in keeping with at least one aspect of her family’s ethos, for the sisters were much influenced by their own father’s view that a biography is only worth doing if it attempts to tell the truth without evasion or pretence. Daphne boldly followed this precept with her own memoir of her father, soon after his death, shocking some of his old friends with her temerity.