The Ottawa Citizen (15/Jul/1990) - Enchanted Cornwall

Details

• article: Enchanted Cornwall
• author(s): Noel Taylor
• newspaper: The Ottawa Citizen (15/Jul/1990)
• keywords: Alfred Hitchcock, Daphne du Maurier, Jamaica Inn (1939), Rebecca (1940), The Birds (1963)

Article

Enchanted Cornwall

Du Maurier's view of the haunted county

Enchanted Cornwall, by Daphne du Maurier; Penguin; 192 pages; $29.95

Daphne du Maurier describes the hold the haunted part of England, the southern tip, has for her. She lived much of her life there alone, a recluse, but her novels — Rebecca, Frenchman's Creek, Jamaica Inn — won an enormous readership around the world.

Editor Piers Dudgeon had access to her diaries and her letters, and reminiscing friends. He puts whole passages of her novels in their natural context and is liberal with his photos — not of the tourist Cornwall of snug harbors and dramatic cliffs, but of bleak moors, lonely farms and lowering clouds.

It's one of these scenes, of a plowman surrounded by swooping gulls, that inspired her best-known short story and which Alfred Hitchcock made into The Birds.

They build an atmosphere that breeds enchantment and feeds the writer's imagination. The result is a unique travelogue through a life.

Vicarious Cornishmen will wallow in it. Du Maurier's admirers, too, for the insights it provides of what makes such a private novelist a worldwide phenomenon.

Du Maurier died a year ago in her home at Kilmarth on the Cornish cliffs.