Du M aurier, D aphne

Abstract

The academic debate about Gothic that has become so prominent in the last few decades has led to the revaluation of many writers. Among these is the prolific and successful twentieth‐century author Daphne du Maurier (1907–89), who produced eighteen novels, a number of memoirs and biographies, two plays, and over forty short stories. Although acknowledged for many years as a supremely successful storyteller, she was firmly relegated to the ranks of the middlebrow and not deemed a suitable subject for serious critical consideration until the mid‐1980s. One of the first articles to assess her work seriously in relation to the literary canon appeared in The Spectator in 1962, prompted by the Penguin reprint of seven of her novels. Its author, Ronald Bryden, dismissed her as a superficial romantic novelist, “Queen of the Wild Mullions,” who, like her father and grandfather before her, indulged in nostalgia and was capable of writing only “a glossy brand of entertaining nonsense” (1962: 514–15). Du Maurier's artistic heritage, as the granddaughter of the famous Punch cartoonist and novelist George du Maurier (the author of Trilby , 1894) and daughter of the celebrated actor Gerald du Maurier, was to have a profound influence on her perception of herself as a writer and on her work. More recent critical appraisals have acknowledged the complex effect of this paternal lineage on her writing, recognizing the creative results of her anxieties concerning influence and identity as she struggled with the assumption that creativity itself was male. Although early academic critiques of her writing focused on femininity and class, subsequent work has recognized her debt to the Gothic tradition and identified the ways in which she adapted it for her own purposes.