Muriel Beaumont with her daughters (l-r)
Jeanne, Angela and Daphne du Maurier.
Jane Dunn's biography of Daphne du Maurier
(aka "Bing") and her sisters, Angela ("Piffy") and Jeanne ("Bird"), arrived on
my desk trailing mystery and excitement. Its campy subtitle, after all, refers
to "hidden" lives. Hidden. For biographers and their publishers, this
is such a tempting word, hinting discreetly at secrets, lies and – in this
instance – sibling rivalry of a particularly sticky, stabby kind. The
momentarily thrilling thought occurred that Margaret
Forster's 1993 biography of Daphne (it was Forster who revealed the
novelist's complicated sexuality, and her obsessions both with Ellen Doubleday,
the wife of her American publishers, and Gertrude Lawrence, the actress) might
finally have a rival.
But, no. She is safe for
now. Dunn has nothing much that is new to say about Daphne. This version of the
writer is just as introverted and as selfish as the last, and the broad
narrative of her life will be familiar to fans: the obsession with a Cornish
house called Menabilly; the mostly unhappy marriage to the soldier and war hero,
Tommy "Boy" Browning; the neglect of her daughters; the incredible success of
her strange and seductive novels.
Given her extraordinary fame – Neville
Chamberlain was reading Rebecca
when he flew to Munich to meet Hitler in 1939 – it goes without saying that her
sisters lived in her shadow. Angela, the eldest of the three, wrote some bad
novels and some slightly better memoirs. Jeanne, the youngest, was a second-rate
painter on the fringes of the St Ives school. Both were lesbians. Were the three
of them deadly enemies? No. Daphne failed to show up to Jeanne's first
exhibition, and was unable to bring herself to praise Angela's creaky melodramas
(white lies, you gather, were not exactly Daphne's thing). But her siblings seem
not to have cared overmuch. Jeanne ploughed her own furrow – quite literally
during the war, when she took up market gardening. Poor old Angela, who called
her autobiography It's
Only the Sister, found Daphne's novels utterly thrilling, and told her
so. They died – Angela was the last to go, in 2002 – as friends.
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