by Jane Dunn
Considering the atmosphere in which the du Maurier sisters grew up it was all the more remarkable that Angela, in her mid-twenties and still clearly in the grip of her family ethos, should court controversy and parental outrage by writing her first novel, The Little Less, in which the central theme was the love of a young woman for another. With great boldness her heroine makes an impassioned plea for the normality of such feelings, and forcefully insists that sexual desire is indeed part of this love. Angela also took up the cudgels in her early memoir, published in her mid-forties, insisting on the naturalness of schoolgirls’ passions for older girls and mistresses, deploring the Victorian mentality that thought the subject ‘unhealthy’ and inappropriate as subject matter in novels. She heartily recommended two works that dealt truthfully with the subject, Mädchen in Uniform, a novel by Christa Winsloe that became the first film to deal openly with lesbianism and double standards, and Julia Strachey’s novel Olivia.
Perhaps thinking of her eighteen-year-old sister’s affair with a charismatic teacher many years her senior, Angela did make one proviso, ‘the only unhealthy matter is when an older woman battens on a young girl’s adoration and cruelly persecutes her mind by maliciously seeing how far her power will reach’.7
If she was thinking of Daphne and Mlle Yvon, however, Angela had underestimated just how much power Daphne exercised in all her relationships, this first serious one being no exception.
All Angela’s youthful tolerance and crusading zeal would seem to dissolve with age, just as her religious feeling increased, along with concern with what her local church and community would think. In her later memoir, written in her early sixties, Angela metaphorically pursed her lips and, after a lifetime of emotional and sexual relationships, mostly with women, harrumphed defensively:
Far too much is talked about homosexuality nowadays, and when it comes to discussions about it on the radio and television I despair, because anything new is interesting to youth, and an innocent-minded boy or girl may learn by these means of homosexual friendships and, prompted by curiosity, set out to discover for himself or herself what it’s all about.8
This did seem rather close to her father’s opinion that had caused her so much grief as a young woman, tiptoeing towards some kind of awareness of herself and how to live in the world.
Daphne’s attitude was much more complex. So much has been written since her death about her ambivalence towards her own sexual identity; she had written about it too in personal letters and public memoir, attempting to apply meaning to her inner life and explain herself to those closest to her. She too recoiled from ‘the L word’, and later expostulated in a letter to Ellen Doubleday, the wife of her American publisher, after describing her youthful love for Mlle Yvon, ‘by God, and by Christ, if anyone should call that sort of love by that unattractive word that begins with L, I’d tear their guts out’.9
When Daphne was enthralled by a woman friend, she did not see herself as a woman in love with another woman: she did not personify herself even as a man, but as a boy, that creative, brave adventurous boy who had shadowed her through childhood. In some ways she did not even think of herself as human and driven by animal passions, but instead as a disembodied spirit. And in this, perhaps, she was closest to the truth, because the important love affairs in Daphne’s life were conducted largely in the imagination. People inspired the stories that she then wove around them, but the living being she used as her ‘peg’, with inconvenient feelings and needs of his or her own, was barely considered. Daphne was fascinated by the way her own creative mind worked and she evolved a theory of her own self.
Some years later, she articulated this first to Ellen Doubleday. Ellen would become one of the most important women in Daphne’s life, the first who needed nothing from her, but was an equal, and immune to manipulation. Instead she offered something of the unconditional affection and acceptance she sought. After their first meeting Daphne had felt it safe to confide in her. Metaphorically, she took a deep breath and let her secret out:
Hold on, brace yourself, see if a McCarter [Ellen’s maiden name] can take it! Go right back into the past and see D. du M as a little girl … very shy, always biting her nails. But never being a little girl. Always being a little boy. And growing up with a boy’s mind and a boy’s heart, and a boy’s love of adventure. So that at eighteen this half-breed fell in love, as a boy would do, with someone quite twelve years older than himself who was French and had all the understanding in the world, and he loved her in every conceivable way up to the age of twenty-three or so. And by doing so, learnt almost all there is to know about that complex thing, a woman’s heart … And then the boy realised he had to grow up and not be a boy any longer, so he turned into a girl, and not an un-attractive one at that, and the boy was locked in a box and put away forever … but when she found Menabilly and lived in it alone, she opened up the box sometimes and let the phantom who was neither girl nor boy but disembodied spirit dance in the evening when there was no one there to see.10
Daphne admitted in a memoir that she was almost adult before she finally learned the true facts of life and how babies were conceived, probably from her fellow students in Paris, or from Mlle Yvon herself. It was also possible that bawdy conversations between the girls involved talk of sex toys that might have given her the idea for her very early short story, ‘The Doll’. This was written when she was just twenty-one and featured a mechanical male doll, described in macabre detail, and which the female object of the narrator’s desire preferred to him. However bold the talk, these well-bred girls, so carefully groomed to make good marriages, were most probably still completely lacking any experience of intimacy with men. Daphne, who had always been alarmed by the nature of men’s relationships with women, remained cynical about the possibility of love.
The extent of sexual ignorance and unhappiness in marriage in society as a whole at the time was significant. This was more than twenty years before Kinsey and the results of his experiments into human sexuality burst into public consciousness. Marie Stopes’s revolutionary sex manual Married Love had been published a few years earlier and become an underground success but was officially dismissed (and banned as late as 1931 by the US customs) and unlikely to get into the hands of the carefully brought-up youth of the du Mauriers’ acquaintance. Heterosexual Victorian and Edwardian men – and women – were largely ignorant of women’s sexual physiology, and barely acknowledged their needs and responses. Angela’s panic when she was eighteen that a chaste kiss could make a woman pregnant was not an isolated misapprehension amongst girls of her class and upbringing. Her admission that she was twenty-five before she connected romantic love, kisses, the conception of babies even, with sexual desire was perhaps rather extreme, but both sexes were inhibited by ignorance, shame, shyness and lack of frank and easy communication on the matter with doctors, friends or partners.
The unhappiness and dissatisfaction in marriages at the time existed mostly due to this ignorance, not only between the sexes but also because well-brought-up women were encouraged to deny in themselves any erotic nature. It was said that Vita Sackville-West, aristocratic writer, gardener and conquistador in love, educated and thereby transformed the erotic expectations of the married women with whom she had affairs, so much so that they were loath to return to the marital bed and the usual wham, bam, thank you ma’am. And Vita was active in the generation between that of the du Maurier girls and their mother.
Early sexual experience, particularly perhaps for a girl, could set the template for life. A clumsy and bungling introduction by an inexperienced or uneducated man could encourage a young woman to think of sex as an unhappy duty – particularly as there was enough propaganda to that effect already. Daphne’s first sexual experiences were with a woman and, although she continued to find both men and women attractive, she was never entirely to enjoy the complete heterosexual experience, as she admitted in a letter many years later. When her teenage daughter requested information about birth c
ontrol, Daphne launched in. ‘Well, anyway, I don’t mind warning you, here and now,’ she told her, ‘that although kissing a person and what I call making love can be absolute heaven, the actual performance, so-called, is the shilling [family code for anything disappointing or worthless] of all time.’11
It seemed that Angela too was rather keener on kissing than anything more, and even then it was the romance of it all that mattered. ‘All I ever aspired to in my thoughts were lovely marvellous, rapturous kisses.’12 Certainly, her fictional alter ego in her first novel, The Little Less, was repelled by the rough advances of a man who could not believe she was as innocent and naïve as she appeared: ‘Never, never, never again would she even speak to a man if this was what happened … She could still feel his hot horrible kisses on her mouth, his hungry hands exploring her body …’13
Although they were very different in character, Angela, Daphne and Jeanne shared so much more in being sisters in a family that considered itself as set apart, and touched with genius and fame. Jeanne and Daphne shared a room until Daphne married. ‘We three got on so well, we never quarrelled, and could discuss every subject under the sun,’14 Daphne remembered. Jeanne, being so much younger, was always amenable to Daphne’s direction in her fantasy adventures, but it was Angela and Daphne who shared most of their secrets and theories of life with each other. Angela looking back on their relationship recalled, ‘Daphne and I shared secrets, and still do. I certainly tell her everything; as a wife and mother she cannot of course go all the way.’15
It was therefore not surprising that in Angela’s first novel the arguments she put into her heroine’s mouth, about the hypocrisy of most marriages, were almost identical to Daphne’s plaint in a letter to Tod, written when she was seventeen. In this she had pointed out how irrational it was that in the eyes of the world a wedding ring seemed to change everything, and yet most of the reasons for marriage were mercenary or dishonest. The elder du Maurier daughters seemed to share a certain disenchantment with marriage, as they saw it practised in their own home and in the homes of their friends, and they discussed what they saw.
In the heat of her obsession, Daphne felt she could not live without Fernande Yvon. She had persuaded her parents not only to let her stay a further two terms at the school in Camposena, turning down a chance to join the family for a holiday in Italy, but also to accompany her teacher in the summer to the spa at La Bourboule in the Auvergne. Having been so heavy-handed with Angela over her desire to have a friendship with an ‘unsuitable’ actress in London, it was remarkable that Gerald and Muriel’s hypersensitive sapphist alert did not begin blaring an alarm. Looking back in middle age, Daphne was surprised by their permissiveness, or blindness.
While staying at the spa town, reading a great deal of good French literature, writing letters, and exploring the surrounding countryside in the afternoon, Daphne was in heaven. She had the object of her desire all to herself and was treated by this apparently sophisticated Frenchwoman as her confidante. Ferdy, for so she became, related dramatic stories of her life in which sudden death and thwarted liaisons largely featured. Daphne listened entranced. When her heroine, however, withdrew into moodiness, refusing to explain why, Daphne felt scared and guilty: the insecure, unloved daughter reared her head and she wondered again if it was all her fault. But she never lost her creative detachment. Despite all the turbulent emotions that buffeted her on the surface, she believed, ‘buried in the unconscious of the eighteen-year-old, must have been the embryo writer, observing, watching, herself unmoved, noting the changing moods of a woman dissatisfied with her mode of life and temporarily bored by her young companion. The seed of an idea …’16
It was inevitable that on this holiday Daphne’s relationship with Fernande Yvon progressed. It was probably here that Daphne ‘loved her in every conceivable way’,17 as she admitted in her letter to Ellen Doubleday. She also wrote in her diary when away from Ferdy of the disappointment of waking up alone. Certainly, when she had to return to England for the last part of the summer, Daphne wrote letters to her every day and confided to her diary that she could think of little else. But life had a way of intruding even on obsession. Aunt Billy had brought her a typewriter from the theatre to encourage her to write more short stories, or even start a novel. Daphne did try to be industrious but gave up at the first technical difficulty of changing the ribbon. There was horse-riding on the heath and tennis with Jeanne and Daddy and the usual social distractions of London, with numerous plays and films to attend and family gatherings she could not avoid. But the return in October to Paris and Ferdy was all that really mattered.
However, even Daphne’s will to remain at the school was not able to resist the tenacious grip of pneumonia. Languishing in the chilly house at Camposena, Daphne began to lose weight quickly. The family at home were concerned enough to depute a rich American friend, who lived in the swanky Crillon Hotel in Paris, to take their daughter into her care. Margaret Miller had been married to Gilbert Miller, an American theatrical impresario who managed for a time the St James’s Theatre in London. She was generous and sophisticated and much loved by Angela, but this time came to the aid of Muriel and her problematic middle daughter. She extracted a reluctant and sobbing Daphne from Mlle Yvon’s care and installed her in her own luxurious suite at the hotel, complete with a steam room to treat respiratory ailments. Unfortunately, she also engaged the ministrations of her own personal doctor, who turned out to be a dangerous quack.
Daphne was booked in at the doctor’s clinic for a daily injection of what turned out to be sal volatile, the active ingredient used in smelling salts. Daphne pleaded that Mlle Fernande should be allowed to visit, but Margaret Miller was not entirely welcoming. Poor Ferdy’s discomfort inspired one of Daphne’s – and the du Mauriers’ – favourite expressions in their private language: as she sat bolt upright on a hard chair, while conversation flowed back and forth but did not include her, ‘hard chair’18 entered the du Maurier lexicon for that sense of offended exclusion.
The treatment continued, but Daphne’s health declined further and she lost more weight, eventually weighing less than seven stone. An anxious Muriel and Jeanne travelled to Paris through the December snow to visit her, with the suggestion that a cure in the rarefied air of Switzerland might be the thing. But Daphne did not want to consider this without having Fernande Yvon with her. Much to Daphne’s consternation her mother and Mlle Yvon were due to meet for the first time for dinner at the Crillon. What would Muriel think? How would Daphne’s feelings for Ferdy change once exposed to the chill reality of home? Despite feeling sick with apprehension, her fears were not realised. She wrote in her diary, ‘everything goes off successfully’19 – though not altogether smoothly, as her journal also records a flaming row between daughter and mother. Daphne had told Muriel she intended returning to Paris after Christmas to continue the treatment, knowing full well it was not working but determined to be close to Ferdy. Daphne won the argument and it was agreed she could return and be cared for by Mlle Yvon until the start of the spring term. Then Angela would take over.
These obsessional, love-struck diary entries embarrassed Daphne when she read them again fifty years later, and it was probably then that she decided to put a fifty-year embargo on their release to the general public, although she used much of their material for her memoir of life before she married. During this period in France, Daphne wrote many letters to Tod and to her sisters. There was no doubt that Angela and Jeanne would have known of the transformation in their sister’s emotional life, although Jeanne at only thirteen might not have recognised the source. Certainly Angela, no stranger to emotional tsunamis, would have sympathised, although none of her crushes had so far been reciprocated or lasted as long.
After she had finished her second and final season in Peter Pan, Angela was dispatched to Paris to care for Daphne. The smelling salts injections recommenced, but now garlic was added to the bizarre mix and Angela was shocked by the sorry sight of her once rob
ust tomboy sister. ‘She was the colour of a banana, smelt like a Calais porter and burst into tears over the smallest matter.’20 Not even the offer of a month’s holiday for the sisters on the Riviera with friends, the hotelier Sir Francis ‘Uncle Frank’ and Lady Towle and their daughter Mollie, could arouse any enthusiasm. When she just burst into tears again, Angela realised that she had to get her sister home.
Daphne felt torn from Paris, the city she had made her own, the city she shared with her grandfather George du Maurier, the city where she had found love. The beauty and sophistication of the buildings and their inhabitants and the proximity of modernist artists and writers working in a shared fever of experimentation had resonated with the spirited girl on her own adventure with life. But particularly its cultural, geographic and emotional distance from parents and home allowed her a heady freedom she had never before enjoyed. Now her education was ‘finished’ and she was ‘out’ in the world, officially an adult, the future seemed limited and alarming. She could not be content, as Angela appeared to be, to hang about at home, living off her parents’ allowance of £150 a year.fn3 She did not care to pass her time in going to parties, theatrical first nights and country house weekends. She had written in her diary on the eve of the new year, 1926, ‘the finish of security. Doubt lies ahead. Adieu les jours heureux.’21