She modeled the novel’s gloomy mansion, Manderley, after an abandoned house in Cornwall that she and her sister had discovered back in 1926. When she sent it off to her editor, she warned that it was “a bit on the gloomy side,” and she had serious doubts about whether people would read it. She became consumed with jealousy of this dead woman, and that jealousy inspired her novel Rebecca (1938). But du Maurier found some letters written to her husband by his former fiancée, who had committed suicide. He sailed to Cornwall to see it for himself, and met the author, and three months later they were married. She published her first novel when she was 24, and her descriptions of Cornwall captivated an army major named Frederick Browning. She and her sister loved to explore the coast, and she wrote about it in many of her books and stories. Her parents bought a summer home in Cornwall when du Maurier was a teenager, and she felt a strong affinity for the place. “All I can remember … is someone who looked at me with a sort of disapproving irritation, a queer unexplained hostility.” “I can’t remember once being held by her, feeling her arms round me, sitting on her lap,” she told a friend. Her mother, as du Maurier remembered her, was a cold woman. Her father was a successful actor-manager, and he was frequently unfaithful. Her parents were wealthy, but bohemian, theater people. It’s the birthday of English novelist Daphne du Maurier, born in London (1907). “Bad News Good News” by Marjorie Saiser from I Have Nothing to Say About Fire.
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