by Jane Dunn
Williams, Michael, ed., My Cornwall (Bossiney Books, 1973)
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
In contemplating writing a biography about her American publisher Nelson Doubleday, soon after his death in 1949, Daphne du Maurier wrote to his widow:
I like to give all truth, if I write about someone in that way … There would be so many things, in his life, like times of unhappiness, and his other marriage, and personal things, moments of elation and depression, that went to make him the man he was – this is often hard for a family to take.
In fact biographies that are neither hagiographic nor concerned mostly with an external life are often hard for a family to take. We all have our own stories of parents and forebears, burnished with the telling; and the detached and unfamiliar gaze of the biographer, working from diaries and letters and previously unknown connections can reveal a more complex story, a different kind of life. Daphne’s children, Tessa Viscountess Montgomery of Alamein, Flavia Lady Leng and Christian (Kits) Browning could not have been more welcoming and generous with their time and hospitality, despite some understandable reservations about my writing about their mother and aunts. They helped enormously with their own reminiscences, pointing me towards possible leads and material and people useful in my further search for the true du Mauriers behind the charming public mask. Although surprised and not entirely happy with some aspects that emerged, to their real credit I was not put under any pressure to modify either material or interpretation in my finished work. In fact, they have continued to support the book by allowing me to quote from wonderful unpublished sources and reproduce family portraits and photos. For this generosity and largeness of spirit, many thanks.
Kits’s wife Olive (Hacker) Browning, their son Robert and Tessa’s daughter Marie-Thérèse (Pooch) Johnston added more memories and insights, for which I am most grateful. Despite the disadvantages of belonging to a famous family that elicits the kind of attention that splashes everyone in their closest circle, I hope that Daphne du Maurier and Her Sisters in the end will encourage more people to read Daphne’s and Angela’s books and to seek out Jeanne’s paintings, keeping evergreen the du Maurier name.
Libraries and archives were my second port of call. The du Maurier family archive is held at Heritage Collections in the Old Library at Exeter University. Here Christine Faunch, Head of Heritage Collections, and the reading room staff, Sue Inskip, Angela Mandrioli, Gemma Poulton and Mike Rickard, could not have been more helpful: they went out of their way to accommodate all my requests. I have particularly fond memories of the pleasure of my long days there. Similarly, Don C. Skemer, Curator of Manuscripts, and AnnaLee Pauls and Charles E. Greene all in the Manuscript Division, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections at Princeton University Library were exemplary in their good humour and efficiency. I am also grateful to Nicholas Scheetz, Manuscript Librarian at the Special Collections Research Centre at Georgetown University Library, Washington DC for his kindness and generosity. Thanks too to Adam J. Dixon, Acquisitions Assistant, Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Centre at Boston University. The unpublished diaries of Sir Cecil Beaton are published by permission of the Masters and Fellows of St John’s College, Cambridge, the Literary Executors of the late Sir Cecil Beaton. All extracts from letters, poems and fiction and non-fiction titles by Angela du Maurier and by Daphne du Maurier are reproduced by permission of Curtis Brown Group Ltd, London, on behalf of The Chichester Partnership, and are the copyright of Angela du Maurier and Daphne du Maurier respectively.
My gratitude to Kathryn McKee, Special Collection Librarian in the Library at St John’s College, Cambridge, and her predecessor Jonathan Harrison, and for the personal kindness and generosity of Hugo Vickers, executor of the literary estates of Sir Cecil Beaton and the Hon. Stephen Tennant. Owners of other private archives have been similarly generous, particularly Margaret Westwood and Ann Baldaro who shared the fascinating archive of their great aunt, Gwen Ffrangcon-Davies. I particularly want to thank Dr Helen Grime of the University of Winchester whose interest and generosity allowed me to access this archive, which is temporarily held at the Martial Rose Library at Winchester. She gave up days of her precious time to search through the uncatalogued papers and present me with the fruits of her labours. Timothy Morgan-Owen also shared with me his uniquely extensive collection of Gertrude Lawrence material. Everyone has been immensely generous in allowing me access to these treasures. Thank you.
The St Ives Trust Study Centre was a delight to visit and Diana Miller and the centre’s head Janet Axten were great enthusiasts in unearthing for me nuggets of information on Jeanne du Maurier. Exhibitions and Collection Officer Louise Holt and Tristan Pollard at the Royal West of England Academy in Bristol were also helpful and super-efficient in allowing me access to Jeanne du Maurier’s paintings and permission to reproduce them in the book.
So many individuals also came to my aid in various ways. Anyone who knows Fowey or loves anything du Maurier will understand my gratitude and affection for Ann and David Willmore of Bookends of Fowey. They welcomed me like an old friend and have offered endless help and interest along with the tea, cake and sympathy. Ann also helped me track down hard-to-find books and fascinating articles. I am particularly pleased to have the chance to reproduce their portrait of Daphne by Jeanne.
Professor Helen Taylor, moving spirit in the establishing of the du Maurier archive at Exeter University and the du Maurier Literary Festival at Fowey (and stalwart at Bath Literary Festival), also has been unfailingly generous, supportive and full of insight. She is a not only an excellent writer, academic and speaker but a most talented interviewer and chair in any discussions and tireless in her support of fellow writers and students in all their enterprises; for this heartfelt thanks.
I remember with great pleasure the 500-mile dash to Mull with my husband and two whippets in the car to see Torosay Castle and meet the fifth Laird of Torosay, Chris James and his wife Sarah. Their friendliness and honesty filled in many essential details about Angela du Maurier’s wartime love affair with Chris’s great-grandmother Olive Guthrie. Serendipitous meetings like these make writing biographies even more surprising and fun.
Maud (‘Tod’) Waddell’s family are numerous and far-flung and have been enthusiastic and generous in their help, notably Susan Waddell in New Zealand, Luigi and Netanja Shaw in Canada, Eric Waddell, John Waddell and Peter Waddell.
Lucia Stuart, granddaughter of Angela’s great friend from girlhood, Betty Hicks, welcomed me to her Seymour Hicks and Ellaline Terriss archive in her wonderful house in Deal. I remember with gratitude too my lunch with Father Ivan Clutterbuck at the College of St Barnabas, set in beautiful countryside in East Sussex, where he recalled his memories of Angela on their trip to the Holy Land.
Margaret Forster kindly shared her impressions of Angela and Jeanne (and Noël Welch), met while researching her great biography of Daphne when the sisters were getting elderly and frail. Irrepressible, ageless and attractive as ever, Esther Rowe, Daphne’s housekeeper for thirty years, was full of tantalising memories and generous-hearted in her interest and hospitality. And Jayne and Kevin Giles, who cared for Angela at Ferryside when she was old, shared their fond memories of her distinctive and particular character.
Jo Powell was one of the first to take a serious interest in Angela and her work and I am ever grateful for our conversations and for the chance to read her thoughtful MA thesis, ‘Angela: The Other du Maurier Girl’. I am also grateful to Collin Langley who, as a tireless enthusiast and researcher on Daphne du Maurier, wrote entertainingly on her poetry and humour and generously shared his findings. My thanks too to art historian and writer Alison Oldham who offered her own fascinating insights in a talk on Jeanne du Maurier and Noël Welch’s poetry and has been most kind in attempting to be a go-between for me with Noël Welch, albeit unsuccessfully.
I would need a slim supplementary appendix if I thanked everyone properly, but heartfelt thanks to all for their various help and time: Jonat
han Aberdeen; Barbara Atcheson; Twinkle Carter; Angus Crichton; Fiona Crichton-Berner; Stef Davies; Sam and James Fairbairn; Susan Greenhill; Georgina Hammick; Beryl Henderson; Polly Higgins; Avril Horner; Morwenna Hussey; Andrew Lycett; Dr Priscilla Martin; Annette Mercer; the late Pam Michael (née Fox); the Hon. Henry Montgomery; Wilton Morley; Peter Parker; Sarah Phillips; Rebecca Ritchie of Curtis Brown Agency; Dr Peter Shephard; Susanna Stables; Ella Westland; Sue Zlosnik.
Publishing a book takes almost as much effort as writing it. I have to thank my agent Derek Johns of AP Watt, now United Agents, who understands just how much benign neglect I need while I’m deep in the writing process. I am blessed with the best publisher in Arabella Pike, clever, canny and lionhearted, and her in-house team of Essie Cousins and Stephen Guise, Sharmila Woollam and Joseph Zigmond, also Anne Rieley and David Atkinson. Helen Ellis’s legendary enthusiasm and publicity expertise is undimmed and infectious and Kate Johnson has shown such patience and sensitivity to meaning and nuance in her editing: I can only thank them all for their cheerful efforts on behalf of the book. Sheila Murphy, dear old friend from Vogue days, has read everything I have ever written and always given me the benefit of her sharp and discriminating mind, but would be the first to point out that any stylistic infelicities and sloppy generalisations are entirely my own.
To my long-suffering friends and beloved family who have had to put up with me, distracted, dull, strained and unavailable for fun, all my love and thanks to you. I promise to try and pace myself better next time …
About the Author
Jane Dunn has been described by the Sunday Times as ‘one of our best biographers’, and her writing about women and their relations ships, and sisters in particular, has been widely acclaimed. Her books include a biography of the sisters Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell and the bestseller Elizabeth & Mary, which looks at the lives of the cousin queens Elizabeth I and Mary, Queen of Scots. She is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and lives in Bath with her husband, the writer and linguist Nicholas Ostler.
By the Same Author
Moon in Eclipse: A Life of Mary Shelley
Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell: A Very Close Conspiracy
Antonia White: A Life
Elizabeth and Mary: Cousins, Rivals, Queens
Read My Heart: Dorothy Osborne & Sir William Temple,
a Love Story in the Age of Revolution
Copyright
First published in Great Britain in 2013 by
HarperPress
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers
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Published by HarperPress in 2013
Copyright © Jane Dunn 2013
The right of Jane Dunn to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Cover photograph © Popperfoto/Getty Images
Source ISBN: 9780007347087
Ebook Edition © February 2013 ISBN: 9780007347117
Version: 2014-02-20
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