A ‘Disembodied Spirit’: Writing, Identity and the Gothic Imagination

Abstract

Daphne du Maurier’s public identity as a romantic novelist and a story-teller who can spin a good yarn has eclipsed for too long her versatility and skill as a writer. In her published works, which span the years 1931 to 1989, she experimented with several genres including the family saga, biography, women’s romantic fiction, the Gothic novel, and the short story. Her writing career was therefore long and varied. Critical interpretation of her work, however, often seems to ‘freeze’ her within a certain mode of writing or within a certain period of her life. Prompted by the Penguin reprint of seven du Maurier novels, Ronald Bryden, for example, produced one of the first articles to assess her work seriously in relation to the literary canon; this appeared in The Spectator in 1962. Recognizing ‘Miss du Maurier…[as]…one of the world’s great literary phenomena’ and noting that her novels ‘have been read by millions of people in scores of languages’, Bryden nevertheless dismissed her as a superficial romantic novelist who, like her father and grandfather before her, revelled in nostalgia and was capable of producing only ‘a glossy brand of entertaining nonsense’.1 This perception of du Maurier as more an entertainer than a serious writer is frequently echoed today.