But she’s also a mother of three children (Tessa, Flavia, and Kits). In a nutshell, that’s who she is: she’s a writer. “Du Maurier is often incorrectly categorised as a romantic novelist, dismissed as just a bestseller”ĭaphne wrote short stories, biography, plays, poetry, biographical fiction and fictional biography, and literary criticism as well as novels. The assumption is that writers who are popular bestsellers simply can’t be literary. Du Maurier is often incorrectly categorised as a romantic novelist, dismissed as just a bestseller. Despite celebrating its 80th anniversary this year, I didn’t want to pick Rebecca, though it’s brilliant of course. But in my own five choices of Daphne du Maurier books, I wanted to showcase the wide range of styles and genres in which du Maurier wrote. Obviously, she’s most well-known for Rebecca and the big Cornish novels: My Cousin Rachel, Frenchman’s Creek, Jamaica Inn. So her career spans a wide temporal range across the twentieth century.

At the moment, she’s enjoying a resurgence of interest and starting to be critically recognised for her talent.Īpart from several short stories published at the end of the 1920s, du Maurier’s writing career really began with her first novel, The Loving Spirit (1931), and Daphne du Maurier continued writing books right up until the publication of her last novel in 1972, Rule Britannia. She’s one of the most important and most neglected 20th-century writers-hugely popular and bestselling but often underrated. Foreign Policy & International Relationsīefore we start talking about Daphne du Maurier’s books, I wonder if we might start with a simple question: who was Daphne du Maurier?.

Daphne du maurier book