Jump to: navigation, search

Edmonton Journal (20/Apr/1989) - Author of gothic romances dies peacefully in her sleep

Details

Article

Author of gothic romances dies peacefully in her sleep

Dame Daphne du Maurier, who once remarked that "I can't say I really like people, perhaps that's why I always preferred to create my own," died Wednesday at age 81.

Monty Baker-Munton, a family friend, said he did not know the cause of death. "For the last fortnight (two weeks) she'd just been in a gentle decline."

Dame Daphne, who also wrote such popular classics as Frenchman's Creek and The Birds, died in her sleep at her home in the village of Par in southwest England.

She had moved to that home, which was called Kilmarth, years ago from Menabilly, the legendary old graystone mansion that she had immortalized as Manderly in Rebecca.

That home, gutted by Oliver Cromwell's troops during England's civil war in the 1600s, typified the historic and adventurous splendor of the Du Maurier oeuvre.

And the opening words of the gothic Rebecca ("Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again...") became one of the best-known phrases in modern English literature.

Through the 29 novels and dozens of short stories she penned in her lifetime ran the melded threads of romance and intrigue.

In an art form often distinguished by economic perfidy, Miss Du Maurier, who in 1969 was made a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire by the queen, was a success since publication of her first novel in 1931, The Loving Spirit.

Several of her works have been adapted for film and television. Rebecca, in which Joan Fontaine played the naive second wife of Sir Laurence Olivier, a widower haunted by the image of his glamorous first mate, won an Academy Award as best picture in 1940.

Alfred Hitchcock directed Jamaica Inn, a Cornish tale of an orphan entwined with smugglers in 1939. Hitchcock also did The Birds in 1963, which is a stark tale of flocks of birds making wanton attacks on humans.

Miss Du Maurier for most of her life fought an unsuccessful battle to keep from being branded a Grand Dame of romance. She chose to call her writings "suspense adventures."

Retrieved from ‘http://the.hitchcock.zone/w/index.php?title=Edmonton_Journal_(20/Apr/1989)_-_Author_of_gothic_romances_dies_peacefully_in_her_sleep&oldid=180865’