She is at the top of my “favorite authors whose work I need to explore more deeply” list, so I’ve put together a primer for getting started with Du Maurier that we can all work through together. She was a master at leaving just enough strings still dangling at the end of a novel that the reader ends up batting like a kitten at them far after the reading is done. Her work has a quality of being easy to relish, fun to read, and also sticking with the reader. If Du Maurier were writing today, she would fall squarely in the “popular fiction” category. Barrie patterned the Darling children after in Peter Pan, and her father was friends with one Sir Alfred Hitchcock, who directed three of her works ( Jamaica Inn, Rebecca, and The Birds). Her maternal grandfather was a Punch cartoonist and is the author of Trilby (1894). Her father was a well-known actor-manager, and her mother was an actress. To begin, a short biographical sketch: Daphne Du Maurier was born in 1907 in London, England, into a literary and dramatic family. In short, she was a Writer with a capital “W.” Du Maurier was a novelist, a poet, a playwright, an essayist, a literary critic, a nonfiction writer, and a biographer. Her books were huge bestsellers when they were published, and many live on in edition after edition. Daphne Du Maurier’s career was long and storied her life was equally so.
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