by Jane Dunn
While for Gerald work had lost its lustre, for his daughters it was just beginning. Their adult lives lay before them, full of unknown possibilities. Having found it difficult to start on her novel about Jane Slade and her shipbuilding family, suddenly, in the autumn of 1929, Daphne began. On 3 October, with a rug around her knees, she sat at her desk in her cold bedroom at Ferryside looking out on the busy harbour, and wrote in capitals the title of her first novel, which had been conceived of on the beach: ‘THE LOVING SPIRIT’. The poem from which it came seemed to express something of what Daphne felt for the abandoned schooner with its great bleached figurehead, symbolic of human endeavour and the family from which she came:
Then art thou glad to seek repose?
Art glad to leave the sea,
And anchor all thy weary woes
In calm Eternity?
Nothing regrets to see thee go –
Not one voice sobs ‘farewell’;
And where thy heart has suffered so,
Canst thou desire to dwell?
Alas! The countless links are strong
That bind us to our clay;
The loving spirit lingers long,
And would not pass away!
The du Maurier family had all left after a hectic social summer at Ferryside and the house was shut up. Daphne lodged with Miss Roberts who lived in The Nook, the cottage opposite, and cooked and skivvied with endless good humour, leaving Daphne to dispose of every hour of her time just as she wished. She could write, take a boat out and go exploring in the company of Bingo, her faithful Cornish mongrel. She longed for nothing more. Every day she would let herself into Ferryside and work there in her room before returning to Miss Roberts’. Sunday supper with the Quiller-Couches at The Haven, their house on the Esplanade in Fowey, became a regular and welcome date, for no one knew more about Cornwall than ‘Q’. He was a much-loved character and Kenneth Grahame claimed him as the inspiration for his immortal Ratty, the friendly and relaxed, if stubborn, water vole in Wind in the Willows, who believed ‘there is nothing – absolutely nothing – half so much worth doing as simply messing about in boats’: it was ‘Q’ to a T. His daughter Foy was as distinctive a character and just as much an attraction for Daphne, for she was a boon companion in any adventure.
The affectionate relationship with Carol continued, he keener than Daphne but luckily as taken up with his work as she was on her book. He mentioned marriage half-jokingly and she said if it meant she could not continue her lengthy retreats to Fowey it would never work, so better think no more of it.
Daphne trespassed in Menabilly again in late autumn, taking with her Foy Quiller-Couch and a torch. The ghosts were once more disturbed and the dust and cobwebs gave up a few more secrets. With each visit the house and its attendant spirits took greater hold of her. She had to return to London for a family Christmas and once more chafed under the strict restrictions put on her movements. It was so ridiculous, she thought, that she was watched and reined in, while it seemed to her that Angela was free to do as she pleased. ‘Whoopee ad lib!’4 Angela had told her sister with glee and, despite Daphne’s sense of unfairness, she had had to laugh. By the new year, Daphne had escaped her parents and returned to Miss Roberts’, and once more was writing at full heat.
Angela meanwhile was in love again – this time with Capri. She and her parents had set off in January 1930 for Naples but had ended up in the island resort for artists and writers and bohemians of all kinds. She may have wept bitter tears as she left on a steamer, bemoaning the fact that falling for a place was doubly unsatisfactory because you could not even hope for letters from an island, but it proved another turning point in her life. She had met the successful English novelist Francis Brett Young, who had lived there for the past nine years with his wife Jessie, and whose novel Portrait of Clare, the last in his Mercian series, was a favourite of hers. As she sat on a pile of old rope in the stern of the boat, Angela at last felt confident enough to embark on her own book.
Just prior to this trip she had met another novelist, the successful and now forgotten Edward Holstius, who had been the first person to seriously suggest to her that she should write and offered what advice and encouragement he could. Having been cast down and hesitant for so long, Angela now felt ready to trespass on her talented younger sister’s territory. She was flouting an unspoken sisterly rule, and so she kept her new writing project secret from her family.
She had been entirely at home in Capri and longed to be left there, while her parents steamed home to Britain without her. The climate, the rocky terrain, the social mix and the sexually tolerant atmosphere she found so attractive, could well have emboldened her in her choice of subject matter for her first novel. Capri had become a centre for creative artists of every nationality and kind, but was also an appealing haven for homosexual men and women who settled there in villas in the verdant hills. The novelist Sir Compton Mackenzie lived there for some years with his wife Faith. She had an affair with another Capri resident, the Italian pianist Renata Borgatti, who then became the lover of the American painter Romaine Brooks. Mackenzie’s inside knowledge of the intrigues and latticed liaisons of the lesbian community of Capri inspired him to write his satirical novel Extraordinary Women. This was published in 1928, the same year as The Well of Loneliness and Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, her playful love letter to Vita Sackville-West, but only Radclyffe Hall’s book faced prosecution.
Rather than it being the subject of shame, scandal and vituperation, Angela learned that, in certain communities in Capri, lesbianism was relatively commonplace, tolerated and unremarkable. This was a revelation that freed her emotionally and creatively. The world at large, however, was not Capri, or even Hampstead. Compton Mackenzie’s Extraordinary Women attracted double-edged praise. The New Statesman, a left-leaning paper known for its socially liberal perspective, published an article commending the book for shining a light on what it considered to be the modern disease of sapphism. It was interesting to see what the educated, mostly male, public thought of female homosexuality at the end of the 1920s – if they thought of it at all – and the kind of snake pit Angela would be entering with her own novel. ‘Twenty years ago,’ the article argued, ‘such a topic could have seemed outrageous and completely unacceptable for a novel; but it is impossible to overlook it in this post-war world populated by girl boys and boy girls.’ It went on to blame the epidemic on the rise of the suffragette movement, Mrs Pankhurst’s hatred of men, indeed the shortage of marriageable men after the war; all played their part in forcing women into each other’s arms. Sapphism, it continued, was ‘a modern social disease … a minor illness … a factitious passion that will pass like all fashions in our society … more a matter of fancy than of facts, easily dissipated by the arrival of a man worthy of the name [my italics]’ – the latter a pompous variation on the age-old theme that all these confused women needed was a jolly good seeing-to!
The argument ended with the damning conclusion that lesbian women were in some way morally polluted. The novel ‘suggests that women cannot fall in love with other women while remaining healthy and decent beings’.5
So, at much the same time that her sister was writing the title of her own first novel, Angela wrote in capitals at the head of a pristine piece of paper her title: ‘THE LITTLE LESS’. She knew she was entering dangerous territory. She was not only about to step on sisterly toes, but also potentially disgust her parents and outrage the world. Like Daphne she had taken her title from a line of a favourite family poem, this time ‘By the Fire-Side’ by Robert Browning. In it he celebrated his love for his wife and for Italy, having experienced ‘the little more’, while Angela’s novel explored the taboo love of a woman for another, who in the end could only offer friendship, in other words, ‘the little less’:
Oh, the little more, and how much it is!
And the little less, and what worlds away!
… Friends – lovers that might have been.
By her own admiss
ion Angela was very young for her age and still in thrall to influential Daddy. This made it all the more astonishing that she could show such open passion and crusading zeal about a subject barely spoken of in polite society. Angela wrote with frank emotion about this outlawed, unrequited love. Here her heroine, Vivian, explains her feelings for Clare to Richard, the man who wishes to marry her, but had thought women incapable of sexual passion:
‘D’you think I don’t know what it is to go hungry day and night, for a look, a word, gathering the least crumbs in such greed that a starved beggar would be a king in comparison? To lie awake at night, telling oneself that such hopelessness must be a nightmare? To have to be ordinary, amusing, talk about everyday affairs when all you can think of is the poetry in your mind and the music in your heart, when you want nothing but to take them in your arms and give them the treasures of the world; and when every kiss you get back is worth more than every king’s ransom since the world began?
‘… I’ll marry you Richard. But – and it’s a hell of a “but” – if ever Clare does send for me I must go to her.’
And as Vivian spoke she knew she’d given herself away …
‘I suppose you’ll hate me now, look upon me as so much offal. That’s the way the world does look on that kind of love.’6
The scene continues with an emotional plea from Vivian for the normality of sexual feelings between women. When Richard declares that such an idea would revolutionise society and suggests, patronisingly, that her passion for Clare was all in the mind, Vivian replies:
‘I’m afraid you’re wrong, Richard. If you love someone completely and utterly you can’t keep physical feelings out of it. To me it’s all beautiful; I refuse to desecrate it by calling it rotten, unnatural, vicious.’
Richard then retreats to the cocktail cabinet to get them both a stiff drink, but still sees it as his mission to marry Vivian and cure her from her sickness. After the violent death of Clare, the object of her desire, Vivian sinks into a lukewarm marriage to Richard, gives birth to a precious son and embarks on an almost love affair with another man. The novel ends with womanly resignation as the heroine accepts that, for the sake of her son, she should hope for nothing now beyond her conventional, passionless marriage.
Angela had already encountered the malevolence towards lesbianism that was aroused in good decent people whom she knew and admired. Agnes Mackay and her sister Lil were unmarried sisters of the Canon of All Saints Church near London’s Oxford Street, known for its Anglo-Catholic services. Angela thought the sisters, ‘like stalwart saints in a medieval age’, and was impressed particularly by Agnes and her good works, including visiting inmates at Holloway women’s prison. The older woman who showed such a Christian tolerance for prostitutes and thieves, however, shocked the young Angela with her vitriolic denunciation of divorcées and lesbians. ‘“As regards the latter,” she literally snorted, “I can smell them a mile off. Dear child, why do you know such people?”’7
Despite this, Angela admitted she adored Agnes for her clarity and her uncompromising faith – and rather riskily imported her character into this first novel as Flora Macdonald, the Scottish spinster militantly spewing out hatred against such women who expressed their true natures, natures in fact like hers, if she had only been less frightened and repressed to accept it.
Both Angela and Daphne put a great deal of themselves and their experience into their novels and short stories. Daphne was frank about the autobiographical impulses in her work, and Angela left in hers many clues to her life and thoughts. Noël Welch, who knew all three sisters well, pointed out that although Angela’s novels lacked the compulsive page-turning excitement of Daphne’s, they were full of warmth and human feeling: ‘She certainly betrays herself more, utterly, sometimes. One is taken aback by the outrightness.’8 Although she could be reserved and guarded in person, in writing, whether letters or novels, Angela gave everything of herself, and this exposure was reckless and courageous in equal measure.
In her memoir of the sisters, written when Angela was respectably middle-aged, Noël Welch pointed out that the eldest du Maurier daughter had enjoyed a wild bohemian past that had alarmed her father: after a youth of crushes on men and women and a couple of attempts at romanticised relationships with the opposite sex had ended in tears, Angela’s turbulent emotions found outlet elsewhere. One of her first loves in her adult life had been the American actress Mary Newcomb. In 1929, Angela, along with half of London, had fallen for her, dazzling as the wronged wife in Jealousy, a play by Eugene Walters. Angela’s feelings of shy, barely expressed desire for a heterosexual woman, for Mary, were written, almost unfiltered, into her novel.
Mary was in her mid-thirties when Angela, eleven years her junior, first made her acquaintance. She was married to Alex Higginson, an American millionaire whose life as a country gentleman and lover of field sports, particularly hunting with hounds, was entirely funded by his indulgent multi-millionaire father, a supremely successful entrepreneur. Apart from supporting his son’s passion for hunting and hounds, he had also founded and funded the Boston Symphony Orchestra and much of Harvard University’s expansion. Alex was almost two decades older than Mary, his third wife, and they had no children, but lived in a country house in Dorset where he became Master of Foxhounds of the Cattistock Hounds, while she pursued her acting career in London.
Another admirer who met Mary Newcomb at the time was the music critic and writer Francis Toye, who explained her attraction: ‘She was famous and much sought after; she was beautiful, she was distinguished, she was rich.’9 He added that not only did she have a wonderful body, shown off to great effect by expensive clothes, but she walked with such sexy grace that all eyes were drawn to her. She reminded him of Vergil’s description of Venus: ‘vera incessu patuit dea’ – she was revealed as a true goddess by her gait.10
Angela not only used her own feelings for Mary as the mainspring of the novel, she found herself writing poetry as a more immediate way of expressing the coup de foudre she had experienced when in her company. This was the first poem in a book of love poems hand-written by Angela and addressed to some of the most important women in her life, each identified with just their initials. Although subsequent poems became more sophisticated in technique, this prosaic one had the narrative drive of a short story and was full of suppressed feeling:
Your voice called ‘Hullo’ –
You were dressed in black,
Together we sat
Through the three hours show of Maugham and Garbo –
You smoked incessantly
(Lucky Strikes)
And you suddenly said
You wished you were dead,
– And talked of suicide –
Do you remember the Savoy,
Later?
You drank champagne, I beer.
And as evening wore on Fear
And excitement seized hold of me.
Oh little you knew at that juncture
The volcanic unrest
You caused in my breast –
We talked, you and I,
Of what? & why?
But our souls lay bare
To each other –
But you were sad
And I felt mad,
So you made a vow –
And I wondered how
I had lived these years without you –
We talked religion,
We talked love.
We discussed almost everything on earth
And above.
My world toppled & crashed that night,
And you set a light
That kindled a flame
And put to shame
All others.
Another significant woman arrived in Angela’s life just as she was writing her first novel in secret in the summer of 1930. Angela Halliday was a great character, valiant and generous, and would remain a confirmed spinster all her life. She was to become a special friend to Angela du Maurier but also a friend to her oth
er two sisters, and Muriel too. She did not merit one of Angela’s love poems, but was hailed as her spiritual twin. It amused them that both were exactly the same age and shared a birthday, mothers with Muriel for a first name, Old Harrovian fathers, nurses called Pearce and childhoods spent in Regent’s Park. If they were twins, however, they made a comic pair as Little and Large, with six-foot Angela Halliday (nicknamed Shaw) towering over a diminutive Angela du Maurier.
That summer, the glamorous Furnesses once more captured Daphne’s interest. One of Lord Furness’s conquests had been an American beauty and actress, Julie Thompson, who for a while seemed set to become a stepmother to his unfortunate daughter Averill. Tod had met her and relayed her impressions to Daphne. Suddenly and incongruously this exquisite creature turned up at a rented cottage at the idyllic Readymoney Cove, at the mouth of the River Fowey, with a new aristocratic boyfriend in tow, Eddie Fitzclarence, who would become the 6th Earl of Munster.
All the sisters were intrigued, not least because they found Julie herself so alluring, and Daphne begged Tod for more salacious gossip on her and the Furness connection. By the summer of 1930, ‘Fiery’ Furness had indeed married again, providing Averill with a stepmother, not Julie, but Thelma Converse, a rich American divorcée with an aspirational eye for glamorous princes. She had already begun her romance with the Prince of Wales and was to introduce him, and lose him, to her friend Wallis Simpson. To restore her wounded pride she moved on to Prince Aly Khan.
At a time when divorce was still shameful and Cousin Geoffrey was the only member of the du Maurier family to have gone down that shady path, the sisters were aghast at the number of divorces that littered the Furness story. Julie was perfectly brazen about hers and mercenary too, when she told a shocked Angela that she did not want to marry Eddie as it would mean she would lose her alimony from Thompson. This was all grist to Daphne’s cynical view of relationships between men and women. She even wondered if Julie’s friendliness towards them was merely a sham, and the real focus of her interest was Gerald and what he could do for her career.