Daphne du Maurier

Daphne du Maurier became famous thanks to her books and the adaptations they inspired, and her life story is just as intriguing as any of her writing. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of I Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Holly Fry. A few
weeks ago, some friends of mine were talking about the
eight novel Rebecca and how good it is. That's the

(00:25):
conversation I over oversaw slash overheard on Twitter. Uh. Somehow,
even though this is totally my kind of book and
I remember my mom having a copy of it when
I was in high school, I had never actually read
the thing. And even though I was really into Alfred
Hitchcock growing up, I had also never seen his film

(00:46):
adaptation beyond clips of it that are in documentaries like
The Celluloid Closet. And then I also missed the BBC
miniseries from and the Netflix adaptation that just came out
last year. Like somehow, I had this total void of
all Rebecca knowledge, beyond the title of the book and

(01:06):
the fact that it really seems like my kind of thing.
So I checked Rebecca out from the library. I read it,
I agreed with my friends about it being very good,
and I became immediately fascinated with its author, Daphneed Marier,
and I thought about maybe saving this episode for October,
since Rebecca was not the only Alfred Hitchcock movie to

(01:28):
start out with her work, and a lot of her
books have a very like dark and suspenseful and foreboding tone.
But I was too eager for this to wait until October.
Everybody's gonna get it now. Also, several heads up on
this episode. Uh, there is going to be some brief
discussion of incest, also a relationship between a teacher and

(01:52):
a student, and disordered eating. It's a trifecta we have
not had before. No, I feel like this is more
more our warnings than we have needed to put on
an episode in a while. Yeah. Uh so. Daphne du
Maarrier became famous thanks to her books and the adaptations
they inspired, but she was born into a family that
was already full of really prominent people. Her father, Sir

(02:15):
Gerald du Maarrier, was an actor and a theater manager.
He was famous enough that when he ran into trouble
with unpaid back taxes in ninety nine, he was able
to make some extra money by licensing his name to
a brand of cigarettes. Her mother, Muriel Beaumont, Lady Dumarrier,
had been an actress before she got married, and from
a young age, Daphne aspired to be like her grandfather,

(02:38):
George Dumarrier, who was an artist for the magazine Punch
and author of the extremely successful serialized novel Trilby, which
was adapted into a play in multiple films. The du
Marriers were also connected to various other famous and influential people,
including Peter Pan author J. M. Barry. He and Daphne's

(02:59):
father started working together in nineteen o two, with Gerald
becoming the first person to play Captain Hook and George
Darling and Peter Pan in nineteen o four. Daphne and
her sisters Angela and Jean called Barry uncle Jim, and
their cousins were the Llewellyn Davies Boys, who were a
big part of the inspiration for Peter Pan. Daphne was

(03:20):
the middle child of the three do Maurie daughters, born
in London on May thirteenth seven. In some ways, the
girls upbringing is a little reminiscent of the Bronte siblings,
which previous hosts of the show covered back in. All
three were highly imaginative, concocting make believe worlds and scenarios
for themselves. This would also carry over into all three

(03:42):
sisters adult lives. Jean was an artist. Angela would also
grow up to be a novelist, although her work was
always overshadowed by her sister Daphne. The girls were mostly
educated at home, cared for by nanny's and educated by governesses.
The family had pet names for a truly everyone in
their lives. Like one of the biographies I read for

(04:04):
this had an index of all the pet names at
the end, they had an invented language they shared among
themselves that was almost like a code, like Wayne meant embarrassing,
a shilling was a disappointment, and Cairo was code for sex.
As they reached puberty, Daphne and her sisters called their
periods Robert, make it, make it French, She'll be Robert.

(04:31):
Being raised by governesses and educated at home was a
fairly typical upbringing for wealthy British children in the early
twentieth century, but in some ways the du Marie's upbringing
really was not typical. Gerald de Marrier seems to have
wanted sons, and in some ways he treated his daughters
like boys, like teaching them to play cricket and box

(04:52):
Gerald actually told Daphne that he wished she were a boy,
and at one point wrote her a poem that included
the line if only she'd a boy. Daphne cut her
hair short, and she wore masculine clothes, and she and
her sister Jean both made male alter egos for themselves.
Jean was David Dampier and Daphne was Eric Avon, who

(05:14):
was dashing and full of daring do and who excelled
at sports. Gerald's relationship with his daughters struck a lot
of people as unusual, and as the girls became teenagers,
he started oversharing the details of his affairs with them.
As Daphne and her sisters started dating men, their father
seemed to become jealous of them. According to Helen Taylor,

(05:37):
who edited The Daphne du Marier Companion in ninety five,
Daphne du Marier told her that she and her father had,
in her words, crossed the line. This is something Taylor
reported after Dumarier's death, and it is not something that
Dumarier herself seems to have put down in writing, but
incests did become a running theme in her fiction and

(05:59):
a subject that people who knew her said seemed to
fascinate her, almost to the point of obsession. In an
interview she gave late in her life, she said quote,
I don't mean bed incest. I mean this thing of
sons looking for their mother's daughters looking for their fathers.
Another recurring theme in her writing was female characters who

(06:19):
wished that they were boys, whether it was there expressing
that wish or describing themselves as being like boys, or
being described by other characters along the lines of she
should have been a boy. And this is something that
du Maurier did write about a lot. In the context
of her own life. She described herself as feeling like

(06:42):
a boy in a girl's body and locking this boy
self away in a box as she grew up to
pursue a marriage and a family. Her writing also suggests
that she saw this as a kind of a duality,
envisioning herself more as a boy when she found herself
attracted to women, but more as a woman when she
was attracted to a man. Do Marie's first accounts of

(07:05):
her attraction to women come from her time at an
exclusive finishing school in Miudon, France, where her classmates included
heiresses and princesses. She started in January of nineteen twenty five,
and she soon met headmistress Mademoiselle Yvon, who Daphne called Ferdy.
She was thirty and Daphne was eighteen. In a letter

(07:25):
to a friend, Daphne wrote, quote, I've quite fallen for
that woman I told you about, Mademoiselle levonn. She has
a fatal attraction. She's absolutely kind of lured me on,
and now I'm coiled in the net. This relationship progressed
from passing notes to Daphne, accompanying her head mistress on
vacation to a spa during the summer to for non supervising,

(07:49):
and nursing Daphne when she had to go to Paris
in the winter to be treated for a respiratory illness.
Daphne never used the word lesbian to describe these attractions,
though she described lesbianism as quote a feeble substitute for
married life and something to get over in youth, and
in one letter called it quote that unattractive word that

(08:10):
begins with L, continuing that she'd tear out the guts
of anyone who described her love that way. Instead, she
referred to her quote Venetian tendencies, and framed her attraction
to women as the re emergence of the boyish soul
that she'd tried to shut away. Mademoiselle Yvonne was fired
without explanation, or at least without explanation that she ever

(08:33):
shared with Daphne, in April of nineteen twenty six, and
Marie worried that this was because of suspicions of over
their relationship. They continued to travel through France together after this, though,
and they continued to write to one another after Daphne
went back to England. When the du mari started talking
about buying a home on the Cornwall coast, Daphne wondered

(08:57):
if it was an attempt to sort of tempt her
a way from going back to France to be with
fernand The du Maurier's new home was called Fairy Side,
and when she turned twenty, Daphne was allowed to stay
there alone, and soon Cornwall became her adopted home. Many
of her works are set in Cornwall, with descriptions that

(09:17):
are so evocative that Cornwall has been described as a
character on its own. While in Cornwall, d Maria found
an unoccupied home called Menabilly. It was originally built during
the Tutor era, and it had been extensively remodeled in
the seventeenth century. It was part of an estate owned
by the Rashleigh family, but it was unoccupied, covered in ivy,

(09:40):
and falling into disrepair. Du Maria fell absolutely in love
with this home and visited it over and over. It
would eventually inspire the settings of multiple books, including Manderley
and her novel Rebecca. In a rift developed in Daphne's
relationship with fernand she wrote Fernando Letter in which she

(10:02):
described her experiences kissing young men, and Fernand's response was
angry and jealous. Soon after, do Marie started a relationship
with Carol Reid. He would go on to direct the
nineteen forty nine film The Third Man. Although she continued
to write to and visit Fernando after this their relationship.
Cooledd Mara published her first short story, called and Now

(10:26):
to God the Father on May fifteenth, nineteen nine. The
story appeared in The Bystander, which her uncle edited. He
published another of her short stories about a month later.
Her first novel was The Loving Spirit, written at the
Summer Home in Cornwall and published in ninety one. Do
Marie loved to walk through the countryside, and on one

(10:46):
of these walks she had found the wreck of a
schooner called the Jane Slade. She became fascinated with the
Slade family, researching their family history and reading through their
letters and records. In the Loving Spirit, the Slades come
the Combs in a historical saga that winds through four
generations of the family. Overall, this was a pretty conventional book.

(11:08):
It was not like the more avant garde and modernist
writing that people like Gertrude Stein were writing that was
coming out at around the same time. It was moderately successful.
It was generally pretty well reviewed, but it also set
the stage for the idea that do Mario was writing
for a popular audience, not writing serious literature. It was

(11:29):
only after her death that scholars really started to approach
her work as being worthy of academic study. To be clear,
it was important to her that she make money, but
she described herself as writing what she was drawn to,
rather than focusing on whether an idea could be a
commercial success. While her publisher heavily promoted her work throughout

(11:50):
her career, she was also reluctant to promote her books
herself through things like signings, appearances, and interviews, and in
some ways this actually just made her seem more intriguing
to the public. Not long after The Loving Spirit was published,
one of Do Marie's sisters told her that there was
a very attractive man in a white motor boat who
was going up and down the harbor outside of their house.

(12:13):
Later on they would describe him as a menace, which
was their secret language word for the sort of incredibly
attractive man that you might just lose your head over.
This was Frederick Arthur Montague Browning, known as Boy or
as Tommy to the people who were closest to him.
He had read The Loving Spirit and had become determined

(12:33):
to meet its author, so he just took his boat
over to the harbor outside their house a little, a
little light stalking um. Do Mari's relationship with Browning really
started when he visited her as she was recovering from
an appendectomy in April of nineteen thirty two, and they
married on July nineteenth of nineteen thirty two. They went

(12:55):
on to have three children, Tessa, Flavia, and Christian, who
was known as Kid. And we'll talk more about all
of this after we paused for a sponsor break. Daphne
du Maria's father, Gerald, died on April eleventh, nine thirty four,

(13:17):
and not long after that do Marier wrote a biography
of him, called Gerald a Portrait. Its publisher was Victor Gulantz,
who also published previous podcast subject Isadora Duncan. This started
a decade's long partnership between writer and publisher. Maria's next
novel was Jamaica In in nineteen thirty six. It was

(13:39):
set in Cornwall, this time inspired by du Maria stay
at the real end of the same name that in
was built in seventeen fifty and had a long association
with smuggling. Jamaica In was d Maarrier's first commercially successful novel,
and Alfred Hitchcock adapted it into a film in nineteen
thirty nine. Neither do Maria nor Hitchcock liked this adaptation.

(14:01):
Though actor Charles Lawton had bought the film rights with
the intent of casting himself as the lead, he had
selected Hitchcock to direct, but he didn't give the director
much creative freedom. To return to nineteen thirty six, Boy
Browning was an officer in the Grenadier guards, eventually attaining
the rank of lieutenant in general. When his regiment was

(14:22):
since to Alexandria Egypt, Do Mario went with him. She
went back to England for a time when she learned
she was pregnant with their second child. After their daughter
was born, she left the children with their grandmothers and
a nanny, and then went back to Alexandria. She missed
Cornwall desperately and found that she didn't enjoy all the
overwhelming social obligations involved with being an officer's wife. She

(14:45):
would say of herself, quote, I can't say I really
like people. Perhaps that's why I always preferred to create
my own. She also said, she wrote, quote because I
never liked myself, and as a writer, I could lose
myself and my characters. While she was pretty confident as
a writer, she had some insecurities in terms of her
personal life. Browning was eleven years older than she was,

(15:08):
and before they had married, he had been engaged to
Jeanette Louisa Ricardo, who was known as Jan. To Daphne,
Jan just seemed far more alluring and glamorous than she was.
She wondered why Jan and boy had never gotten married.
She wondered whether she could ever measure up to Jan.

(15:28):
At one point, she found a stack of Jan's old
letters to boy tied up with a ribbon, and she
read through all of them, noticing that she signed Jan
with a very large and distinctive Jay Do. Marie's homesickness
for Cornwall, her self, doubt, her envy and fascination with
her husband's former fiancee, and the derelict estate of Menabilly

(15:49):
all set into her work on Rebecca. It was a
book that she struggled to write for a long time,
knowing only that it was about a widower second wife
who felt overshadowed by the lay first wife, Rebecca. Victor
Gallant's marketed Rebecca as a romance, and a lot of
people read it that way, and that really surprised Daphney Dumarrier.

(16:10):
She described this book as a study in jealousy. Holly,
have you read this book? I have, though it has
been a long time, but I have seen the movie
much more recently. I think maybe we'll talk about it
some more and behind the scenes. Um This drew out
a lot of comparisons to Jane Eyre, with people describing
du Maurier is sort of the spiritual successor to Charlotte Bronte.

(16:33):
Rebecca was an immediate success when it was published in
nineteen thirty eight. It sold forty thousand copies over the
course of a month, and was translated into multiple languages.
In nineteen forty, du Maurier wrote Come Wind, Come Weather,
and This was a brief collection of stories about ordinary
people meant to inspire the people of Britain during the

(16:53):
hardships of World War Two. Also in nineteen forty, Alfred
Hitchcock adapted Rebecca into the famous film. Du Maria was
much happier with this adaptation than she had been with
Jamaica in although that really was not a particularly high bar.
This film was a huge success, both commercially and critically.
It won Academy Awards for Best Picture and Best Cinematography,

(17:16):
and it was the only one of Hitchcock's films to
be named Best Picture. But it also caught the attention
of other people whose work had some similarities to du Maria's.
In one, Brazilian writer Carolina Nabuco publicly accused Dumaria of
plagiarizing Rebecca from her novel A Sussex. Ara Nubuco had

(17:37):
translated her book into English herself, and the English language
manuscript had been passed around among publishers in the U
s and England, Although du Maria's publisher managed to head
off a legal battle, The New York Times published a
piece tracing the many parallels between these two novels, although
that that piece does acknowledge that Rebecca's biggest prizes do

(18:00):
not appear in a sex Aura at all. Do Maria
denied any wrongdoing, noting that the stories about hasty marriages
of young women to wealthy older men and widower second
wives feeling intimidated by the woman who preceded them were
really not at all unique. Yeah, she was kind of
like everybody, like, there are a ton of books. This

(18:21):
is a trope. She acknowledged that fact. So by this
point Daphne and Boy had three children. Their son Kits,
had been born also in nineteen forty. Daphney doated on
him far more than she had with either of their daughters.
In ninety three, she convinced to doctor John Rashly to
lease menability to her. The home was entailed to the

(18:45):
Rashley family, so do Maria could never actually own it,
but she was granted a twenty year lease under the
condition that she maintained it. She called it my mena
Menabilly was in serious disrepair. It took several months of
work before her family can move in, and although a
lot of improvements were made, it was still really run down.

(19:05):
There was no central heat, and it was infested with
rodents and fungus and plants. Parts of it were completely
off limits because of the risk of collapse, but do
Marie adored it and she lived there with the staff
of cooks, servants and nanny's who cared for the children,
who knew not to disturb their mother when they heard
the sound of the old typewriter she used to write

(19:26):
her books. She was highly focused on her work. Her
husband joked that when she was in the midst of
working on a novel, she could walk into a lamp
post and not even notice it. But she also made
sure to make time to play with the children every day,
and she loved to walk with the dogs and sail
and arrange flowers to adorn their home. Do Mara and
her husband were a part during most of World War

(19:48):
Two because of his military service, including becoming chief of
staff to Lewis Mountbatton, the first Earl of Mount Batton
and also working with Prince Philip, later the Duke of Edinburgh.
In nineteen forty six he was knighted and that made
du mari a lady Daphnee Browning. Although she was generally
known as Daphne du Maria, you don't really see her

(20:09):
called Daphnee Browning unless it's in like a formal legal
document or something. When Browning was appointed Military Secretary of
the War Office in London in nineteen forty six, he
was able to reunite with his wife after many years
away at war. They had some trouble rekindling their relationship.
Though Browning had also served in World War One and

(20:30):
had recurring nightmares after returning home, his experiences in World
War Two had compounded that trauma. This episode isn't about him,
so we're not going to go into a whole lot
of detail, but he had been part of Operation Market Garden.
During the planning stages. He was the one who described
part of the operation as possibly being a bridge too far.

(20:51):
The operation ultimately failed, leading to more than fifteen thousand
Allied casualties and the loss of hundreds of aircraft. Browning
spent themer of nineteen forty six with du Marier at Menability.
Their relationship had previously been quite passionate, with the two
of them describing themselves as deeply in love with each other,
but in letters to fernand that she wrote towards the

(21:13):
end of that summer, d Maria confided that it had
become pretty much entirely platonic. Things got even harder when
Browning went back to work, and they only saw each
other on periodic weekends, with one of them visiting the
other either at Menability or in London. In nineteen forty seven,
do Marie faced another plagiarism allegation, this time of Edwina

(21:36):
McDonald's nineteen twenty seven novel Blind Windows. That case had
seemed like it was settled years before, but McDonald had
died and her son had resurrected the lawsuit, and this
time the case went to court and du Maria had
to travel to New York City to testify. At this point,
du Maria was famous enough that her American publisher, Nelson Doubleday, Sr.

(21:57):
Sent his wife Ellen to a company d Marrow and
her children on the Transatlantic voyage, and Daphne felt absolutely
in love with Ellen. At first, she really doesn't seem
to have been shure how to deal with this. She
was married and in her mind, her Venetian tendencies and
her boyish soul that had all been sealed away. She

(22:20):
tried to avoid Ellen aboard the ship and gave her
kurt kind of cold responses whenever Ellen would try to
talk to her. Eventually, the two women did become close friends.
Daphne confessed her feelings to Ellen, along with her sense
that they were a re emergence of the boy that
she had shut away. Ellen explained that she could not
reciprocate this apart from not sharing the same feelings, her

(22:42):
husband was dying of cancer. Ultimately, there was just no
proof that du Maurier had ever read Blind Windows or
the short story by the same author that it had
been based on, and a judge ruled that while there
were some parallels between the two, they were two different books,
just with similar setting. That case was appealed, but it
was ultimately dismissed. Do Maria returned to England and had

(23:06):
what was described as a breakdown from the stress of
the accusations and the court proceedings. The difficulties of the
Transatlantic voyage and her unrequited feelings for Ellen Doubleday. In Night,
Frederick Browning became controller and treasurer to Princess Elizabeth the Future,
Queen Elizabeth the Second, and Prince Philip. That same year,

(23:28):
du Maria wrote the play September Tide, which became kind
of a vehicle for her feelings for Ellen Doubleday. The
story involves a widow named Stella who develops feelings for
her son in law you In. Stella was something of
a stand in for Ellen. When this play was staged
in London in ninety eight, fifty year old Gertrude Lawrence,

(23:50):
who had previously had an affair with du Maria's father,
was cast in the role of Stella. At first, do
Marie really hated this casting, but over time aimes she
described her feelings for Ellen transferring to Gertrude. Gertrude's part
in this relationship isn't entirely clear, but Daphne was absolutely

(24:10):
devastated when she suddenly died of cancer and hepatitis on
September six two, at the age of fifty four. The
lights on Broadway were dimmed to mark her passing. She's
been noted as the first person to be honored this
way on Broadway. This marked a shift into Marie's life
which we are going to get into you after we

(24:31):
first paused for a sponsor break. After the death of
Gertrude Lawrence Stephne du Maurier experienced a really deep depression,
with her family describing her as almost catatonic, and in
addition to her grief, she just felt like she was

(24:53):
getting old. Her book My Cousin Rachel, which had come
out in nineteen fifty one, had been as enormously success
s full as Rebecca was, but then The Apple Tree,
which was her short story collection that followed it, had
been very badly reviewed. The Apple Tree was the collection
that included her story The Birds, and critics just found

(25:13):
it to be too violent and sordid. After all this
to Mare was having a lot more trouble writing and
was feeling less creative, and her relationship with her husband,
who was still working at Buckingham Palace and making periodic
weekend visits, was becoming even more strained. In nineteen fifty seven,
right around their twenty fifth wedding anniversary, he was hospitalized

(25:34):
for nervous exhaustion compounded by the effects of alcohol abuse.
Do Marier learned that he had been having affairs when
one of the women that he was involved with called
her to tell her it was all her fault. Although
du Maria is best known for her novels, she also
wrote biographies, and one of these, which was The Infernal
World of Branwell Bronte, came out in nineteen sixty In

(25:57):
nineteen sixty three, Alfred Hitchcock finished his third d Maria
film adaptation, that was The Birds. To Maria was not
really a fan of this film. Hitchcock moved the setting
of the book from England to California, and while du
Maria's story focused on a farmer and his family, she
described Hitchcock's characters as quote irritating people in San Francisco.

(26:21):
She was frustrated by the changes that were made to
the plot and the fact that he didn't often credit
her work and interviews that he gave about the movie.
This film led to another allegation of plagiarism, this time
involving Frank Baker's ninety six novel The Birds. Do Marier
denied this as well, and it's again not clear whether
she had ever read his novel. She said that her

(26:43):
initial inspiration for the birds started with watching flocks of
birds following farmers as they plowed fields in Cornwall and
wondering what if they get tired of worms. On March
fourteenth five, Frederick Boy Browning died after a long period
of declining physical and mental health, including the amputation of
his lower left leg in nineteen sixty four because of

(27:05):
circulatory problems. Do Maria was really grief stricken and remorseful.
She blamed herself. She felt like she had contributed to
his death by staying in Cornwall while he was in
London for a year. She dressed only in black and
white and took comfort in the idea that he was
waiting for her. Although her books don't really include a

(27:26):
lot of straight up ghosts, they do sometimes have some
otherworldly happenings, and after her husband's death, she had a
growing interest in the paranormal. Four years later, Daphne du
Marier lost her lease on her beloved Menability. Doctor Rashley
had died and she'd spent several years negotiating with his heir,

(27:46):
who wanted to move in, so she leased another home
on the Rashleigh property known as kill Marth, this time
working out a lifetime lease, and she lived there for
the rest of her life. While Kilmarth had a lovely
view of the ocean Shin, she missed Menability deeply, and
this move also prompted another layer of grief over her
husband's death. Grouting had really loved kill Marth, and he

(28:10):
had encouraged du Maria to move there before his death.
When she learned that the foundations at Kilmarth dated back
to the fourteenth century, she turned that idea into a
book called The House and the Strand. After moving to Kilmarth,
she also got a driver's license after going with that
one for twenty five years, so she could be more
independent and visit her children and grandchildren more easily. Du

(28:33):
Marie's last novel, Rule Britannia, was published in nineteen seventy two.
It's been described as almost predicting breggsit It's set in
the not too distant future, and it describes the UK
leaving the European Economic Community and joining the US to
form a new country, us UK pronounced you Suck. It

(28:53):
was not subtle in its satire or its politics, and
it was very badly received After that she published a
couple of works of non fiction, including an autobiography called
Growing Pains, which came out in nineteen seventy seven. That
book stopped with her marriage because she found she just
could not continue after that point. She was also deeply

(29:14):
upset by the portrayal of her late husband in the
nineteen seventy seven film Abridge Too Far, which depicted him
not only as being almost solely responsible for the failure
of Operation Market Garden, but also insensitive to the loss
of so many men. Feeling like she was at a
total creative loss, do Marie had an emotional breakdown in

(29:35):
nineteen eight one. She died on April nineteenth, nine, eighty nine,
at the age of eighty one, after a long period
of decline compounded by secretly refusing to eat. She was
cremated and her ashes were scattered at Kilmar. During her lifetime,
she had earned multiple honors and awards. These included the
National Book Award for Rebecca in ninety eight and being

(29:58):
named a Fellow of the roy Society of Literature in
nineteen fifty two. She was named Dame Commander Order of
the British Empire for her services to literature in nineteen
sixty nine, and she earned the Mystery Writers of America
Grand Master Award in nineteen seventy seven. It's clear that
Daphne du Maurier experienced a lot of inner turmoil about

(30:19):
her sexuality, her gender, and the expectations placed on her
as a woman and as an officer's wife, but others
described her as outwardly extremely calm and courteous, just about unflappable.
Sheila Hodges, who was her editor for almost forty years,
described her as not wanting to be a bother during
editing and accepting changes without complaint, writing quote, no one

(30:41):
could have been more cooperative or less prima donna like
than she was on those occasions. There was really only
one book that Hodges described Maria as really pushing back on,
which was The Golden Lads, Sir Francis Bacon, Anthony Bacon
and their Friends. Basically, du mari had become really fascinated
by the idea of a potential connection between Francis Bacon

(31:03):
and William Shakespeare, and since she didn't have hard evidence,
she had included this idea as like little illusions scattered
throughout the book. Hodges cut all these out and du
Maria wrote to say that she wanted them all back in.
She noted that most people probably were not even going
to notice them, and quote if it annoys others, I

(31:24):
just don't care. I love that. Hodges only learned much
later that there were times when du Maria did not
like her edits, but also didn't say anything about it.
While du Maria is best known for her fiction, The
Golden Lads was one of five biographies she wrote during
her lifetime, she also wrote books on Cornwall, a history
of the du Maurier family, short stories, and plays. In

(31:48):
addition to the three Alfred Hitchcock adaptations that we've discussed,
there have been at least ten film adaptations of her
work and at least forty TV dramatizations. Her work was
usually well suited to these kinds of adaptations. Some were
slow building and psychologically tense, which made for good dramas
and thrillers. Or they were more melodramatic and featured things

(32:09):
like smugglers and pirates, or they were more romantic. She
was also a really visual writer, which made it easy
for filmmakers to see characters and settings in their minds.
I one of the hallmarks of de Marie's books is
striking first line, so we thought we would end with
a few of them. The most famous, of course, is
the first line of Rebecca. Last Night I dreamt I

(32:30):
went to Manderley again. The Birds begins with on December
the third, the wind changed overnight and it was winter.
And then in the Apple Tree it opens with they
told me afterwards they had found nothing, no trace of
anyone living or dead. It's also really good at chapter endings, yeah,
since you get to the end of the chapter and

(32:52):
you're like, well, I can't stop there. But those are
harder to read as one sentence in a podcast. UM,
I'm so glad that you did this one because I
love her story. Um. It's complex and it's difficult, but
it's also one of those things it's really illustrative of
just the ways that people kind of create an image

(33:14):
of someone who's in the public eye when really there's
a whole other life going on, particularly their internal life
and what they're struggling with, um or just trying to
figure out. And I always liked those stories, So thank you. Yeah,
I'm I'm glad. I just saw two friends having a
random conversation on Twitter about Rebecca it took me on

(33:36):
a whole whole journey. See now I want you to
do the dramatic reading of the Twitter, but really I
know you have listener mail. I do have listener mail.
It is from Amber. Amber says, oh, this is in
in reference to our episode about the Nelson Pill hearings,
and Amber said, Hello, Holly and Tracy. I'm a few
weeks behind on podcasts and have been catching up while

(33:59):
unpacking from my recent move. Today I listened to your
podcast from the beginning of May on the Nelson Pill Hearings,
which has come at an unusually meaningful time. A couple
of years ago, I became aware of birth control side
effects after a nurse practitioner shout out to hard working
and well educated nurses notified me that the birth control

(34:20):
I had been prescribed for the last decade may put
me at a higher risk of strokes since I suffer
from migraines with aura. Fast forward two years and my cousin,
who also suffers from very severe and frequent migraines with aura,
began IVF. She was also completely unaware of the possibility
that this may increase her stroke risk due to her

(34:41):
additional risk factors. Her fertility doctor did not require her
to get an exam from her neurologist, and this weekend,
my cousin suffered a stroke. Luckily, due to the conversation
she and I had as she was nearing the end
of her IVF cycle, she went to the hospital and time,
and the stroke did not cause any major damage. My
cousin is thirty three. I'm sharing this experience with the

(35:03):
hope that people will advocate for themselves with their doctor
asked them if you should get additional consults from your
other specialists. If your doctor doesn't walk through risk factors
of medications, asked them to do so. You're not a
burden and your health is so much more meaningful than
the five extra minutes that you need to give up.
Holly and Tracy, thank you for continuing to break down

(35:24):
meaningful historical topics that can also affect our daily lives.
All the best, Amber, thank you so much for this email. Amber,
I wrote back to Amber, I'm so glad that your
cousin is okay, and I'm so glad that you gave
us permission to read this um. I always want to
check with people when I feel like they've shared something
particularly personal so thank you for allowing us to share
this email and the you know, the warnings and encouragement

(35:49):
to talk to to to your doctors about concerns um
because I feel like that's just so incredibly important, So
thank you again, Amber. If you would like to write
to us about this or any other podcast, where History
Podcast at i heeart radio dot com and we're all
over social media ad miss in History. That's where you'll
find our Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and Instagram. And you can
subscribe to our show on the I heart radio app

(36:10):
and Apple podcast and anywhere else you get your favorite podcasts.
Stuff you Missed in History Class is a production of
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