Daphne du Maurier's son reveals 'Rebecca’ was based on the author's life

From the Telegraph

Interview in the Telegraph with the author's son Kits Browning which discusses some of the source material for the novel including du Maurier's life and some interesting documents. It also notes that there is a new adaptation in the pipeline! Read the full interview here.






Some excerpts: 

'"Very roughly, the book will be about the influence of a first wife on a second,” wrote Daphne du Maurier in her notes. “Until wife 2 is haunted day and night… a tragedy is looming very close and crash! Bang! Something happens.”

[...]

The seed of the story lay in du Maurier’s jealousy of Jan Ricardo, the first fiancée of her husband. “I know that she came across one or two letters or cards, fairly sort of harmless things, where Jan did sign 'Jan Ricardo’ with this wonderful great R,” says Browning, flourishing his hand in the air. It is a portentous curlicue that is emulated in the book.

“The name Rebecca,” wrote du Maurier, “stood out black and strong, the tall and sloping R dwarfing the other letters.” Ricardo later threw herself under a train, although not, Browning says, due to his parents’ marriage. Still, it is said that Daphne was haunted by the suspicion that her husband remained attracted to Ricardo.

[...]

Manderley, like Hogwarts and Brideshead, is a name fixed in our imagination. Yet the anonymity of the novel’s narrator continues to intrigue. “She couldn’t think what to call her and so she didn’t call her anything. And then it became a challenge: could she actually write the whole thing without it,” says Browning. “Funnily enough, in the Hitchcock film, in the script she is written as 'I’, but they all called her 'Daphne’ on the shoot.”

Both Mrs de Winters were drawn from du Maurier’s own character. “I always identified Mum with the second, rather timid one,” says Browning. “It was totally split, because she was just as good as Rebecca at the sailing and all that toughness.'


You can see Vivian Leigh's test reel for the part of the second Mrs de Winter - here (via @DrJenBarnes)

Other du Maurier content on this blog can be found - here

Daphne du Maurier's papers are held in University of Exeter's Heritage Collections and form part of the subject of Prof. Helen Taylor's chapter in the forthcoming book: The Boundaries of the Literary Archive

Missing Screenplays Unearthed in the Archive: Laurence Olivier's lost Macbeth

Exeter English academic Jennifer Barnes has recently stumbled across the kind of thing everyone secretly (or not so secretly) hopes to find in the archive -- a missing piece, a lost treasure. Very much in the manner of Possession's Roland Michell (although very much minus any hint of cheekily pocketing said lost treasures) Jennifer discovered 13 previous unstudied versions of Laurence Olivier's 1950s screenplay of Macbeth, a film that was never made, in the Laurence Olivier Archive at the British Library whislt working through production notes for a different Olivier production. Jennifer has subsequently brought to light this body of scripts previously thought to barely exist let alone be 'lost' (Olivier claimed that the only existing script planned for the production was 'not any better than a sketch').

Jennifer explains of the 13 manuscripts:

'... the final shooting script certainly does not correspond to Olivier’s reference to the project as a mere “sketch”. Rather, it offers intricate timings, set plans, set designs and technical notes alongside a finalized script. A reading of all of the catalogued manuscripts confirms that Olivier’s cuts to the play text (unlike those of Hamlet) are minimal. It also reveals that the running time for Macbeth would, like that of Henry V,Hamlet, and Richard III, reach approximately 155 minutes. I can only conclude that Olivier did not want the screenplays to be seen following the failure of the film to make it to the screen. But these documents are worthy of study in their own right, attesting to Olivier’s cultural significance as a Shakespearean icon in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.'

The details of this rather wonderful find and an exploration of the light it sheds on Olivier and his oeuvre can be found in Jennifer's recent article: “Posterity is Dispossessed”: Laurence Olivier’s Macbeth manuscripts in 1958 and 2012.’ Shakespeare Bulletin. 30:3 (2012): 263-297. A link to her academic profile can be found here.

Exeter Loans Du Maurier’s notebook to the British Library

The University of Exeter has loaned The Rebecca Notebook – the key document that defended Daphne Du Maurier against plagiarism – to the British Library for the major new Writing Britain: Wastelands to Wonderlands exhibition.

Obviously, this is some great publicity for archives and heritage collections at the Uni where Carrie and I currently work and study (and as regularly as possible try to champion the collections), and draws attention to the excellent Du Maurier holdings we have here.

The notebook has been on public display along with other items such as Du Maurier’s writing desk within Exeter’s recently revamped Research Commons. The book was donated to Exeter in 2001 by Du Maurier’s children; it contains draft material for her most famous novel Rebecca, and as such was used as evidence in a plagiarism case launcehd against the writer in 1947, proving the authenticity of her authorship of the novel.

The Notebook appears in a section of the exhibition that looks at how writers are inspired by the rivers, seashores and other waterscapes of the country, alongside some other regionally related mauscripts such as the Exeter Book from Exeter Cathedral.

Christine Faunch, head of heritage collections (and a speaker back at our original conference), said of the loan: “These unique items are a fantastic resource for our students, who regularly consult them for dissertations, and our academics. However, we are also committed to sharing our historic documents with wider audiences.”

For full information (and further words from Chris), see Exeter’s news pages.

For more information on Writing Britain: Wastelands to Wonderlands, click here.