I’ve seen the 2017 adaptation of My Cousin Rachel, and it’s delightfully atmospheric I think Du Maurier might have liked it, despite being notoriously unimpressed with adaptations of her work in general. Instead, check out the 2014 BBC miniseries. Du Maurier didn’t like it, and it is significantly different from the book, so perhaps avoid that. For Jamaica Inn, the 1939 film is the only one available. I will close with some adaptation recommendations, since Du Maurier’s work has been adapted regularly ever since she started publishing. de Winter ( who takes her tea in bags) tries desperately to fill her predecessor’s shoes - with Mrs. Max de Winter, on the other hand, does not want to talk about Rebecca at all, and it is the central tension of the plot while the second Mrs. Danvers, had a fixation and has kept her presence in the house alive. de Winter - Rebecca - looms large at the de Winter estate of Manderley, not in the least because the estate housekeeper, Mrs. The titular character is dead, and we meet her widower in Monte Carlo through the eyes of the unnamed narrator - a young and impressionable woman who becomes the second Mrs. If only one of Du Maurier’s books were to survive in perpetuity, it would be Rebecca, haunting readers and stymying filmmakers forever. She is at the top of my “favorite authors whose work I need to explore more deeply” list, so I’ve put together a primer for getting started with Du Maurier that we can all work through together. She was a master at leaving just enough strings still dangling at the end of a novel that the reader ends up batting like a kitten at them far after the reading is done. Her work has a quality of being easy to relish, fun to read, and also sticking with the reader. If Du Maurier were writing today, she would fall squarely in the “popular fiction” category. Barrie patterned the Darling children after in Peter Pan, and her father was friends with one Sir Alfred Hitchcock, who directed three of her works ( Jamaica Inn, Rebecca, and The Birds). Her maternal grandfather was a Punch cartoonist and is the author of Trilby (1894). Her father was a well-known actor-manager, and her mother was an actress.

To begin, a short biographical sketch: Daphne Du Maurier was born in 1907 in London, England, into a literary and dramatic family. In short, she was a Writer with a capital “W.” Du Maurier was a novelist, a poet, a playwright, an essayist, a literary critic, a nonfiction writer, and a biographer. Her books were huge bestsellers when they were published, and many live on in edition after edition. Daphne Du Maurier’s career was long and storied her life was equally so.

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