then there are blackbirds

Daphne du Maurier’s Enchanted Cornwall: Her Pictorial Memoir is a little bit a memoir about du Maurier’s life, but mostly about her lifelong love affair with Cornwall and the many books that she set there. The book was published near the end of her life (perhaps posthumously?) and is thus padded out with long excerpts from those books, most of which I skipped because either (a) I had read the book and therefore didn’t need to reread the excerpt, or (b) I hadn’t read the book and didn’t want to be spoiled, but nonetheless a good read because it’s full of interesting tidbits. For instance:

J. M. Barrie was du Maurier’s uncle and her older sister Alice played Wendy in one production of Peter Pan.

(There are some other connections that I can’t remember off the top of my head, but it certainly confirmed my feeling that the entirety of the early 20th century British art world - art encompassing theater, painting, writing, etc - was in fact one extended social network where everyone knew everyone and half of them were related by marriage.)

During the filming of Rebecca, Alfred Hitchcock referred to the (nameless) main character as Daphne de Winter, an identification which du Maurier cheerfully accepts.

Although the grounds of Manderley were based on the grounds of du Maurier’s beloved Menabilly, the house itself was based on a different country house, Milton.

Although du Maurier recounts her courtship with her husband (which seems to have loosely inspired Frenchman’s Creek), the real love story of this book is with Menabilly. Du Maurier devotes an entire chapter to wooing and winning the house. The distant glimpses from sea and land. The first visit, cut short when an early darkness descends while du Maurier and her sister approach the house on the winding forested front drive. The second visit, when du Maurier rose before dawn to approach by the sea. Repeated visits to explore the grounds, culminating at last in a visit where du Maurier found a window open, and climbed in to explore the crumbling abandoned house…

All this culminated in du Maurier securing the house for a twenty-five year rental, begun during World War II. Everyone told her that she’d never be able to repair the roof, get electricity installed, or otherwise render the place habitable, and she proved all of them wrong.

Du Maurier considered Frenchman’s Creek her only really romantic book. So if you’ve ever read her other books and wondered “Am I supposed to consider this horror show of a couple romantic?”, the answer is apparently no!