A Spellbinding Storyteller

This month Fowey plays host to an arts and literary festival celebrating a world-renowned writer who became Cornwall’s most famous adopted daughter.

- Bernard Bale

LET your imagination travel back in time to May 1937. Picture a young woman seated in a hut in the grounds of Menabilly manor house near Fowey and overlooking The Gribbin. She has just given birth to her second daughter, Flavia. As she sits deep in thought she is writing a book that will not only enhance her growing literary reputation but gain her a place among the exclusive band of British classical writers. The young woman is, of course, Daphne Du Maurier and the book is Rebecca.

This month, her 110th birthday will be celebrated at the famous Fowey Festival. The celebration is not just a commemoration of her birth in 1907 but a tribute to her incredible literary contribution, and Fowey’s continued contribution, to the arts.

Daphne Du Maurier was actually born in North London and her childhood saw her much-travelled including a spell at a finishing school near Paris. But there was no place like Cornwall where she had holidayed and when the family bought a holiday home – Ferryside in Fowey – she was thrilled.

Daphne loved everything about Cornwall – the sea, the beaches, the land, the people and the peace. Above all she felt an immediate connection with the atmosphere of Cornwall, something she reflects in her writing. She wanted to tell a story but she also wanted her readers to ‘feel’ what they were reading. Her aim was to create an atmosphere that magnetised her readers. And she succeeded.

It has been well-chronicled that Daphne was the middle of three daughters born to actor and theatre manager Gerald Du Maurier – himself the son of a writer and artist – and Muriel, a successful actress.