DAPHNE
DU MAURIER
AND HER SISTERS
The Hidden Lives of
Piffy, Bird and Bing
JANE DUNN
Dedication
In celebration of all sisters,
and particularly mine:
Kari, Izzy, B, Trish and Sue
(and our outnumbered brothers Marko and Andy)
CONTENTS
DU MAURIER FAMILY TREE
PREFACE
But it is very foolish to ask questions about any young ladies – about any three sisters just grown up; for one knows, without being told, exactly what they are – all very accomplished and pleasing, and one very pretty. There is a beauty in every family. It is a regular thing. Two play on the piano-forte, and one on the harp – and all sing – Or would sing if they were taught – or sing all the better for not being taught – or something like it.
JANE AUSTEN, Mansfield Park
JANE AUSTEN UNDERSTOOD about sisters. Mansfield Park and Persuasion seethe with them. Pride and Prejudice is as much about the affection, rivalry and vexation of sisters as it is about the complicated progress of true love for Jane and Elizabeth with Bingley and Darcy. Jane Austen shared a bedroom with her elder sister Cassandra all her life and they relied entirely on each other’s love and support. There is something infinitely touching about their relationship, and tragic too, for Cassandra lived on alone for twenty-eight years after her younger sister died.
In biography, families are the soil out of which character grows, and one of the richest composts is the relationship of sisters. They are ever fascinating, cast from the same mould yet struggling for difference, brought up in the same family yet each with a childhood unique to herself. For good and ill, the sibling bond lasts a lifetime, longer than any other relationship with parents, partners or children, and it is sisters who weave the most complex webs of love and loyalty, resentment and hurt. Adults can turn sisters against each other by cruel comparisons and overt favouritism, as happened in the lifelong feud, continuing into their nineties, between the star of the film of Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca, Joan Fontaine, and her elder sister Olivia de Havilland, who landed the starring role in Daphne’s other great blockbuster, My Cousin Rachel. When sisters’ affections turn sour it can be deadly, for each knows the family’s secrets. More often, however, sisters are a foil and support to each other, a source of inspiration and close conspiracy; the safety net encouraging flight and breaking a fall.
Daphne du Maurier was fascinated by the Brontë siblings and identified with them all, but she jokingly hoped she and her sisters might emulate Charlotte, Emily and Anne one day, if only she could get her artist sister to write too. A bevy of sisters is more than the sum of its parts and it is to this protean relationship that I, as a biographer, like to turn. The first pair I explored was Virginia Woolf and her artist sister Vanessa Bell. This was an archetypal relationship of passionate dependence and rivalry, ultimately transfigured into self-sacrificing love, remarkably well delineated in the sisters’ own letters, Virginia’s novels and Vanessa’s portraits. I followed Virginia & Vanessa with other biographies that featured prominently sisters, daughters and female cousins. Then, with this book, another set of sisters drew my attention.
For most of my life I had been unaware that Daphne du Maurier, author of so many stories that had gripped my young self, had any sisters at all. To find that she had two, her elder sister Angela a writer like herself, and her younger, Jeanne, a painter, piqued my interest. To have a sister’s fame so eclipse the others was psychologically interesting. Even more intriguing, however, was to find how different were the characters and lives of all three du Maurier sisters, yet how strongly imprinted with family values, bonded to each other in their desire to live in close proximity in Cornwall – with Jeanne eventually settling over the border in Dartmoor.
In writing the story of