The spellbinding power of the du Maurier family
From our UK edition
‘We can never go back again,’ wrote Daphne du Maurier in her bestselling novel Rebecca (1938). ‘The past is still too close to us.’ Yet back she went, in book after book, to the past of her remarkable family. In 1934, six months after the death of her father, the matinée idol Gerald du Maurier, Daphne wrote his biography, portraying him as a spoilt man-baby with a ‘stable’ of mistresses. Gerald’s own father, George du Maurier, was the celebrated book illustrator and Punch cartoonist whose creation of characters such as Mrs Ponsonby de Tomkyns and Lady Gatheremall skewered the Victorian nouveaux riches.
