Epilogue
In the story's epilogue, set nineteen years later, Ginny Weasley and Harry have three children named James, Albus Severus, and Lily. Ron and Hermione have two children named Rose and Hugo. The two families meet at King's Cross Station when they are taking their children to Platform Nine and Three Quarters for their departure to Hogwarts. Lily is too young to attend Hogwarts just yet, Albus is entering his first year at the school, and James is already an experienced Gryffindor. James finds Teddy Lupin, the son of Lupin and Tonks, kissing a girl named Victoire, who James says is his cousin and so can be assumed to be the daughter of Bill Weasley and Fleur Delacour. Neville Longbottom is now the Herbology professor at the school and is close friends with Harry. At the station, Harry, Ginny, Ron, and Hermione spot Draco Malfoy across the platform with his unnamed wife and their son Scorpius; it is suggested that the former rivals have reconciled their differences. The book ends with the line: "The scar had not pained Harry for nineteen years. All was well."
Showing posts with label British novelists. Show all posts
Showing posts with label British novelists. Show all posts
Monday, 23 July 2007
Monday, 14 May 2007
How good was Du Maurier?
Guardian Unlimited: Arts blog - books
Let's not get carried away about Du Maurier
John Mullan
May 11, 2007 4:18 PM
http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/books/2007/05/dont_get_carried_away_about_du.html
Don't look now: Daphne DuMaurier at her desk. Photograph: Hans Wild/Time Life Pictures/Getty Images
Should Daphne Du Maurier's literary status be higher? To coincide with her centenray on Sunday, Radio 4 is having a Daphne Du Maurier season and a film biography is to run on BBC TV. Sir Christopher Frayling has written a laudatory preface to a new Daphne du Maurier Companion and was on the Today programme this week with film director Nicholas Roeg to argue for her merits. "Can she be regarded as a great novelist?" asked interviewer Sarah Montague. Well, can she?
Her fiction makes for terrific films because she had the gift of tapping in to some of our peculiar fears. Hitchcock's The Birds and Roeg's Don't Look Now were both extrapolated from Du Maurier short stories that do touch this pulse. "There is no greater horror than the loss of a child," said Nicholas Roeg, and the idea of the story that he elaborated is a gripping one. Similarly, Rebecca is psychologically clever, a Cinderella tale that implies the sexual fears which undermine the romance.
"It's quite difficult to be taken seriously by the critics and be a bestseller," was Frayling's explanation of her status. But Du Maurier's bestsellers were not so by accident. Jamaica Inn was a "tale of adventure" set in Cornwall, with villainous smugglers and wreckers, and "atmospheric" scenes on Bodmin Moor. It has a sturdy, standard-issue romantic heroine who has to choose between glowering sub-Brontë Cornishmen. (Rochester/Heathcliff figures recur in her fiction.) Plenty of her output is efficient historical flummery. Only a care with natural description sets Frenchman's Creek apart from formula historical fiction.
Du Maurier is being celebrated because she had an undoubted Gothic tendency, and Gothic is nowadays much over-valued by critics. Like much Gothic fiction, Du Maurier's best work deals in visceral topics in a superficial way. She taps into things that matter to us, yet she is simply not much of a writer. Rebecca may be psychologically interesting, but its narrator's breathy prose is oddly witless and wordy. Take a sample piece of prose - the sometimes admired opening of this novel would do - and you will find the slightly jarring infelicities - unhappy repetitions of words, mixing of metaphors, inexact vocabulary - that define a limited literary talent.
Let's not get carried away about Du Maurier
John Mullan
May 11, 2007 4:18 PM
http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/books/2007/05/dont_get_carried_away_about_du.html
Don't look now: Daphne DuMaurier at her desk. Photograph: Hans Wild/Time Life Pictures/Getty Images
Should Daphne Du Maurier's literary status be higher? To coincide with her centenray on Sunday, Radio 4 is having a Daphne Du Maurier season and a film biography is to run on BBC TV. Sir Christopher Frayling has written a laudatory preface to a new Daphne du Maurier Companion and was on the Today programme this week with film director Nicholas Roeg to argue for her merits. "Can she be regarded as a great novelist?" asked interviewer Sarah Montague. Well, can she?
Her fiction makes for terrific films because she had the gift of tapping in to some of our peculiar fears. Hitchcock's The Birds and Roeg's Don't Look Now were both extrapolated from Du Maurier short stories that do touch this pulse. "There is no greater horror than the loss of a child," said Nicholas Roeg, and the idea of the story that he elaborated is a gripping one. Similarly, Rebecca is psychologically clever, a Cinderella tale that implies the sexual fears which undermine the romance.
"It's quite difficult to be taken seriously by the critics and be a bestseller," was Frayling's explanation of her status. But Du Maurier's bestsellers were not so by accident. Jamaica Inn was a "tale of adventure" set in Cornwall, with villainous smugglers and wreckers, and "atmospheric" scenes on Bodmin Moor. It has a sturdy, standard-issue romantic heroine who has to choose between glowering sub-Brontë Cornishmen. (Rochester/Heathcliff figures recur in her fiction.) Plenty of her output is efficient historical flummery. Only a care with natural description sets Frenchman's Creek apart from formula historical fiction.
Du Maurier is being celebrated because she had an undoubted Gothic tendency, and Gothic is nowadays much over-valued by critics. Like much Gothic fiction, Du Maurier's best work deals in visceral topics in a superficial way. She taps into things that matter to us, yet she is simply not much of a writer. Rebecca may be psychologically interesting, but its narrator's breathy prose is oddly witless and wordy. Take a sample piece of prose - the sometimes admired opening of this novel would do - and you will find the slightly jarring infelicities - unhappy repetitions of words, mixing of metaphors, inexact vocabulary - that define a limited literary talent.
Daphne du Maurier ~ Centenary of her birth 2007
Daphne du Maurier (1907-1989) - married name Lady Daphne Browning
English novelist, biographer, and playwright, who published romantic suspense novels, mostly set on the coast of Cornwall. Du Maurier is best known for REBECCA (1938), filmed by Alfred Hitchcock in 1940. Orson Welles's radio adaptation from 1938 also paved way for its success. The novel has been characterized as the last and most famous imitations of Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre (1847).
"Adventure was here. Adventure was there. Adventure was in picking up a posy dropped by a lady and offering it to an old gentleman who patted her head and gave her two-pence. Adventure was in gazing into pawnbrokers' windows, in riding in wagons when the carter smiled, in scuffling with apprentice boys, in hovering outside the bookshops, and when the bookseller was inside, tearing out the middle pages to read at home, for prospective purchasers never looked at anything but the beginning and the end." (from Mary Anne, 1954)
Daphne du Maurier was born in London into an artistic family. She was the granddaughter of caricaturist George du Maurier, her mother, Muriel Beaumont, was an actress, and her father was the actor-manager Sir Gerald du Maurier, who turned to writing and created the mad hypnotist Svengali. One of her ancestors was Mary Anne Clarke, the mistress of the duke of York, second son of King George III. She later became the heroine of du Maurier's novel MARY ANNE (1954). In 1831 Mary Anne Clarke's daughter married Louis-Mathurin Busson du Maurier. Her father Du Maurier portrayed in GERALD (1934). THE GLASS-BLOWERS (1963) was a novel about the Busson family.
Du Maurier grew up in a lively London household, where friends like J.M. Barrie and Edgar Wallace visited frequently. Her uncle, a magazine editor, published one of her stories when she was only a teenager and got her a literary agent. Du Maurier attended schools in London, Meudon, France, and Paris. In her childhood she was a voracious reader, she was fascinated by imaginary worlds and developed a male alter ego for herself. Du Maurier also had a male narrator in several novels. Her first book, THE LOVING SPIRIT, appeared in 1931. It was followed by JAMAICA INN (1936), a historical tale of smugglers, which was bought for the movies, and directed by Alfred Hitchcock, who later used her short story, 'The Birds', a tense tale of nature turning on humanity, for another film production. Also Du Maurier's FRENCHMAN'S CREEK, a pirate romance, and MY COUSIN RACHEL (1951), were succesfully filmed. The latter examined how a man may be manipulated by a woman, who perhaps has murdered her husband. Ambrose Ashley meets the beautiful Rachel Sangaletti, marries her and died six months later. He has sent letters to his nephew Philip, the narrator, who first hates Rachel, and then is bewitched by her. Du Maurier leaves open the question, is Rachel a posoner, or an innocent victim of Ambrose's and then Philip's paranoid fantasies. The author herself was as puzzled as her readers, did Rachel kill Ambrose. "Sometimes I think she did, sometimes I didn't - in the end I just couldn't make up my mind," du Maurier said. Rachel dies, taking the secret with her, but Philip's role in her death is clear, and perhaps he is the real murderer of the story.
In 1932 du Maurier married to Lieutenant Colonel Frederick Arthur Montague Browning II, who was knighted for his distinguished service during World War II. They were happily married for thirty-three years and had three children; Browning died in 1965. Du Maurier was made dame in 1969 for her literary distinction. She died on April 19, 1989. Her pictorial memoir, ENCHANTED CORNWALL, appeared posthumously in 1992. With her son, Christian, she published VANISHING CORNWALL in 1967. Like Rebecca, many of her novels and short stories were set in Cornwall, England's westernmost county, whose wild, stormy weather and wild past inspired her imagination. "Here was the freedom I desired, long sought-for, not yet known," she wrote in Vanishing Cornwall. "Freedom to write, to walk, to wander, freedom to climb hills, to pull a boat, to be alone." Du Maurier's home was at a seventeenth-century mansion, Menabilly, overlooking the sea, for a quarter of a century. The house became the scene of her historical novel THE KING'S GENERAL (1946).
Rebecca's opening line, "Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again," is among the most memorable in twentieth-century literature. The story centers on a young and timid heroine. Her life is made miserable by her strangely behaving husband, Maxim de Winter, whom she just have married. Maxim is a wealthy widower, whose wife Rebecca has died in mysterious circumstances. His house is ruled by Mrs. Danvers, the housekeeper, who has made Rebecca's room a shrine. Du Maurier focuses on the fears and fantasies of the new wife, who eventually learns, that her husband did not love his former wife, a cruel, egoistical woman. Because of the familiar plot, suits of plagiarism were brought against du Maurier, but they were dropped when the widespread use of the theme, beginning from Charlotte Brontë's works, was established. Du Maurier's book, on the other hand, inspired Maureen Freely's novel The Other Rebecca (1996), in which the enigmatic Maxim de Winter appears as Max Midwinter.
Du Maurier started to write Rebecca while traveling in Egypt. She poured all of her own emotions in the central characted after learning about her husband's earlier live and his great love, Jan Ricardo, who had been an exotic, dark beauty. Before Alfred Hitchcock's film version, Orson Welles made a radio dramatization of Rebecca. It was performed in December 1938 by The Campbell Playhouse and sponsored by Campbell Soup. The adaptation starts with Bernard Herrmann's waltz-ladden score, but is then interrupted by an "important message from a man who keeps one eye on the dining table and another on the pantry..." Welles played Maxim de Winter and Margaret Sullavan the second Mrs de Winter. The producer David O. Selznick sent a transcript of the broadcast to Hitchcock. "If we do in motion pictures as fauthful a job as Welles did on the radio," Selznick wrote, "we are likely to have the same success the book had and the same success that Welles had."
Besides popular novels Du Maurier published short stories, plays, and biographies, among others Branwell Brontë's, the brother of sisters Anne, Charlotte, and Emily. Her biography of Francis Bacon, an English statesman in the 1500s and 1600s, appeared in 1976. Du Maurier's autobiography, GROWING PAINS, was published when she was 70. In the late 1950s, du Maurier began to take interest in the supernatural. During this period she wrote several stories, which explored fears and paranoid fantasies, among them 'The Pool', in which a young girl glimpses a magical world in the woods, but is later barred from it, and 'The Blue Lenses', in which a woman sees everyone around her having the head of an animal. In 1970 appeared her second collection of short stories, NOT AFTER MIDNIGHT, which included 'Don't Look Now', a tale set in Venice, involving a psychic old lady, a man with the sixth sense, and a murderous dwarf. A film version of the story, directed by Nicholas Roeg, was made in 1973. Du Maurier received in 1977 the Grand Master Award from the Mystery Writers of America.
For further reading: Daphne Du Maurier by Richard Kelly ( 1987); Daphne: The Life of Daphne du Maurier by Judith Cook (1991); The Private World of Daphne du Maurier by Martyn Shallcross (1992); Daphne du Maurier by Margaret Forster (1993); Daphne Du Maurier: A Daughter's Memoir by Flavia Leng (1995); Daphne Du Maurier: Writing, Identity and the Gothic Imagination by Avril Horner, Sue Zlosnik (1998); Mystery and Suspense Writers, vol. 1, ed. by Robin W. Winks (1998); Daphne Du Maurier, Haunted Heiress by Nina Auerbach (1999) - George Du Maurier (1834-96). Artist and illustrator, born in Paris. Joined the staff of Punch, and gained fame as a satirist. Wrote and illustrated three novels. He produced his first novel, Peter Ibbetson (1891), at the age of fifty-six, and then wrote Trilby (1894), which brought the name of a character, Svengali, to common use. - Note: Du Maurier's and actress Gertrude Lawrence's love letters were published in Daphne Du Maurier: The Secret Life of the Renowned Storyteller by Margaret Forster (1993) - Other film adaptations: Hungry Hill, dir. by Brian Desmond Hurst, 1946; The Birds, dir. by Alfred Hitchcock, script Evan Hunter, 1963; Don't Look Now, dir. by Nicholas Roeg, 1973. "Birds was slaughtered by Stanley Kauffman in the New Republic (April 13, 1963): "The script by Evan Hunter... is absolutely bereft of even the slick-magazine sophistication that Hitchcock's films usually have. The dialogue is stupid, the characters insufficiently developed to rank as cliches, the story incohesive... Suzanne Pleshette as a local schoolteacher is unobjectionable. The rest of the cast are offensively bad." - Suomeksi kirjailijalta on myös suomennettu kokoelma Linnut ja muita kertomuksia.
Selected works:
THE LOVING SPIRIT, 1931
I'LL NEVER BE YOUNG AGAIN, 1932
THE PROGRESS OF JULIUS, 1933
GERALD: A PORTRAIT, 1934
JAMAICA INN, 1936 - film 1939, dir. by Alfred Hitchcock, script Sidney Gillant, Joan Harrison, J.B. Priestley - TV serial in 1985
THE DU MAURIERS, 1937
REBECCA, 1938 - (suom. Helvi Vasara) - film 1940, dir. by Alfred Hitchcock, starring Laurence Olivier, Joan Fontaine, George Sanders. Rebecca was one of the top five box-office hits of 1940 and won Academy Awards for Best Picture and Cinematography. However, all reviews were not positive: "Dave Selznick's picture is too tragic and deeply psychological to hit the fancy of wide audience appeal... General audiences will tab it as a long-drawn out drama that could have been told better in less footage." (Variety, March 27. 1940) Du Maurier herself did not like the film, which shifted the locale from Cornwall to America. - TV serial in 1979 and 1997 .
HAPPY CHRISTMAS, 1940
REBECCA, 1940 (play)
COME WIND, COME WEATHER, 1941
FRENCHMAN'S CREEK, 1941 - Merirosvo ja kartanonrouva (suom. Raili Phan-Chan) -The- film 1944, dir. by Mitchell Leisen, starring Joan Fontaine, Arturo de Cordova, Basil Rathbone, Nigel Bruce
HUNGRY HILL, 1943 - Neljänteen sukupolveen (suom. Maija-Liisa Virtanen)
SPRING PICTURE, 1944
THE YEARS BETWEEN, 1944 (play)
LONDON AND PARIS, 1945
THE YEARS BETWEEN, 1945 - film 1946, dir. by Compton Bennett, starring Michael Redgrave, Valerie Hobson, Flora Robson, Felix Aylmer
THE KING'S GENERAL, 1946 - Kuninkaan kenraali (suom. Hilkka Koskiluoma)
HUNGRY HILL, 1947 (screenplay with Terence Young and Francis Crowdy) - film dir. by Brian Desmond Hurst, starring Margaret Lockwood, Dennis Price, Cecil Parker
SEPTEMBER TIDE, 1948 (play)
SEPTEMBER TIDE, 1949
THE PARASITES, 1949 - Kolmen piiri (suom. Kai Kaila)
THE YOUNG GEORGE DU MAURIER, 1951 (ed.)
MY COUSIN RACHEL, 1951 - Serkkuni Raakel (suom. Kyllikki Mäntylä) - film 1952, dir. by Henry Koster, script Nunnally Johnson, starring Olivia de Haviland and Richard Burton
THE APPLE TREE, 1952
MARY ANNE, 1954 - (suom. Maija-Leena Reunanen)
EARLY STORIES, 1954
THE SCAPEGOAT, 1957 - Kaksoisolento (suom. Maija-Leena Reunanen) - film 1958, dir. by Robert Hamer, script Gore Vidal, Robert Hamer, starring Bette Davis, Alec Guinness
THE BREAKING POINT, 1959
THE INFERNAL WORLD OF BRANWELL BRONTË, 1960
THE TREASURY OF DU MAURIER SHORT STORIES, 1960
CASTLE D'OR, 1962 (with Arthur Quiller-Couch)
THE GLASS BLOWERS, 1963 - Lasinpuhaltajat (suom. Kaija Kauppi)
THE FLIGHT OF THE FALCON, 1965 - Haukan lento
VANISHING CORNWALL, 1967
THE HOUSE ON THE STRAND, 1969 - Talo rannalla (suom. Kristiina Kivivuori)
NOT AFTER MIDNIGHT, 1971
RULE BRITANNIA, 1972 - Tapahtui eräänä päivänä (suom. Kristiina Kivivuori)
GOLDEN LADS, 1975
THE BREAKTHROUGH, 1976 (television play)
THE WINDING STAIR: FRANCIS BACON, HIS RISE AND FALL, 1976
ECHOES FROM THE MACABRE, 1976
GROWING PAINS: THE SHAPING OF A WRITER / MYSELF WHEN YOUNG, 1977
FOUR GREAT CORNISH NOVELS, 1978
THE RENDEZVOUS, AND OTHER STORIES, 1980
THE "REBECCA" NOTEBOOK, AND OTHER MEMORIES, 1981
CLASSICS OF THE MACABRE, 1987
MY COUSIN RACHEL, 1990 (play, ed. by Diana Morgan)
ENCHANTED CORNWALL, 1992
DAPHNE DU MAURIER: LETTERS FROM MENABILLY, 1994 (ed. by Oriel Malet)
English novelist, biographer, and playwright, who published romantic suspense novels, mostly set on the coast of Cornwall. Du Maurier is best known for REBECCA (1938), filmed by Alfred Hitchcock in 1940. Orson Welles's radio adaptation from 1938 also paved way for its success. The novel has been characterized as the last and most famous imitations of Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre (1847).
"Adventure was here. Adventure was there. Adventure was in picking up a posy dropped by a lady and offering it to an old gentleman who patted her head and gave her two-pence. Adventure was in gazing into pawnbrokers' windows, in riding in wagons when the carter smiled, in scuffling with apprentice boys, in hovering outside the bookshops, and when the bookseller was inside, tearing out the middle pages to read at home, for prospective purchasers never looked at anything but the beginning and the end." (from Mary Anne, 1954)
Daphne du Maurier was born in London into an artistic family. She was the granddaughter of caricaturist George du Maurier, her mother, Muriel Beaumont, was an actress, and her father was the actor-manager Sir Gerald du Maurier, who turned to writing and created the mad hypnotist Svengali. One of her ancestors was Mary Anne Clarke, the mistress of the duke of York, second son of King George III. She later became the heroine of du Maurier's novel MARY ANNE (1954). In 1831 Mary Anne Clarke's daughter married Louis-Mathurin Busson du Maurier. Her father Du Maurier portrayed in GERALD (1934). THE GLASS-BLOWERS (1963) was a novel about the Busson family.
Du Maurier grew up in a lively London household, where friends like J.M. Barrie and Edgar Wallace visited frequently. Her uncle, a magazine editor, published one of her stories when she was only a teenager and got her a literary agent. Du Maurier attended schools in London, Meudon, France, and Paris. In her childhood she was a voracious reader, she was fascinated by imaginary worlds and developed a male alter ego for herself. Du Maurier also had a male narrator in several novels. Her first book, THE LOVING SPIRIT, appeared in 1931. It was followed by JAMAICA INN (1936), a historical tale of smugglers, which was bought for the movies, and directed by Alfred Hitchcock, who later used her short story, 'The Birds', a tense tale of nature turning on humanity, for another film production. Also Du Maurier's FRENCHMAN'S CREEK, a pirate romance, and MY COUSIN RACHEL (1951), were succesfully filmed. The latter examined how a man may be manipulated by a woman, who perhaps has murdered her husband. Ambrose Ashley meets the beautiful Rachel Sangaletti, marries her and died six months later. He has sent letters to his nephew Philip, the narrator, who first hates Rachel, and then is bewitched by her. Du Maurier leaves open the question, is Rachel a posoner, or an innocent victim of Ambrose's and then Philip's paranoid fantasies. The author herself was as puzzled as her readers, did Rachel kill Ambrose. "Sometimes I think she did, sometimes I didn't - in the end I just couldn't make up my mind," du Maurier said. Rachel dies, taking the secret with her, but Philip's role in her death is clear, and perhaps he is the real murderer of the story.
In 1932 du Maurier married to Lieutenant Colonel Frederick Arthur Montague Browning II, who was knighted for his distinguished service during World War II. They were happily married for thirty-three years and had three children; Browning died in 1965. Du Maurier was made dame in 1969 for her literary distinction. She died on April 19, 1989. Her pictorial memoir, ENCHANTED CORNWALL, appeared posthumously in 1992. With her son, Christian, she published VANISHING CORNWALL in 1967. Like Rebecca, many of her novels and short stories were set in Cornwall, England's westernmost county, whose wild, stormy weather and wild past inspired her imagination. "Here was the freedom I desired, long sought-for, not yet known," she wrote in Vanishing Cornwall. "Freedom to write, to walk, to wander, freedom to climb hills, to pull a boat, to be alone." Du Maurier's home was at a seventeenth-century mansion, Menabilly, overlooking the sea, for a quarter of a century. The house became the scene of her historical novel THE KING'S GENERAL (1946).
Rebecca's opening line, "Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again," is among the most memorable in twentieth-century literature. The story centers on a young and timid heroine. Her life is made miserable by her strangely behaving husband, Maxim de Winter, whom she just have married. Maxim is a wealthy widower, whose wife Rebecca has died in mysterious circumstances. His house is ruled by Mrs. Danvers, the housekeeper, who has made Rebecca's room a shrine. Du Maurier focuses on the fears and fantasies of the new wife, who eventually learns, that her husband did not love his former wife, a cruel, egoistical woman. Because of the familiar plot, suits of plagiarism were brought against du Maurier, but they were dropped when the widespread use of the theme, beginning from Charlotte Brontë's works, was established. Du Maurier's book, on the other hand, inspired Maureen Freely's novel The Other Rebecca (1996), in which the enigmatic Maxim de Winter appears as Max Midwinter.
Du Maurier started to write Rebecca while traveling in Egypt. She poured all of her own emotions in the central characted after learning about her husband's earlier live and his great love, Jan Ricardo, who had been an exotic, dark beauty. Before Alfred Hitchcock's film version, Orson Welles made a radio dramatization of Rebecca. It was performed in December 1938 by The Campbell Playhouse and sponsored by Campbell Soup. The adaptation starts with Bernard Herrmann's waltz-ladden score, but is then interrupted by an "important message from a man who keeps one eye on the dining table and another on the pantry..." Welles played Maxim de Winter and Margaret Sullavan the second Mrs de Winter. The producer David O. Selznick sent a transcript of the broadcast to Hitchcock. "If we do in motion pictures as fauthful a job as Welles did on the radio," Selznick wrote, "we are likely to have the same success the book had and the same success that Welles had."
Besides popular novels Du Maurier published short stories, plays, and biographies, among others Branwell Brontë's, the brother of sisters Anne, Charlotte, and Emily. Her biography of Francis Bacon, an English statesman in the 1500s and 1600s, appeared in 1976. Du Maurier's autobiography, GROWING PAINS, was published when she was 70. In the late 1950s, du Maurier began to take interest in the supernatural. During this period she wrote several stories, which explored fears and paranoid fantasies, among them 'The Pool', in which a young girl glimpses a magical world in the woods, but is later barred from it, and 'The Blue Lenses', in which a woman sees everyone around her having the head of an animal. In 1970 appeared her second collection of short stories, NOT AFTER MIDNIGHT, which included 'Don't Look Now', a tale set in Venice, involving a psychic old lady, a man with the sixth sense, and a murderous dwarf. A film version of the story, directed by Nicholas Roeg, was made in 1973. Du Maurier received in 1977 the Grand Master Award from the Mystery Writers of America.
For further reading: Daphne Du Maurier by Richard Kelly ( 1987); Daphne: The Life of Daphne du Maurier by Judith Cook (1991); The Private World of Daphne du Maurier by Martyn Shallcross (1992); Daphne du Maurier by Margaret Forster (1993); Daphne Du Maurier: A Daughter's Memoir by Flavia Leng (1995); Daphne Du Maurier: Writing, Identity and the Gothic Imagination by Avril Horner, Sue Zlosnik (1998); Mystery and Suspense Writers, vol. 1, ed. by Robin W. Winks (1998); Daphne Du Maurier, Haunted Heiress by Nina Auerbach (1999) - George Du Maurier (1834-96). Artist and illustrator, born in Paris. Joined the staff of Punch, and gained fame as a satirist. Wrote and illustrated three novels. He produced his first novel, Peter Ibbetson (1891), at the age of fifty-six, and then wrote Trilby (1894), which brought the name of a character, Svengali, to common use. - Note: Du Maurier's and actress Gertrude Lawrence's love letters were published in Daphne Du Maurier: The Secret Life of the Renowned Storyteller by Margaret Forster (1993) - Other film adaptations: Hungry Hill, dir. by Brian Desmond Hurst, 1946; The Birds, dir. by Alfred Hitchcock, script Evan Hunter, 1963; Don't Look Now, dir. by Nicholas Roeg, 1973. "Birds was slaughtered by Stanley Kauffman in the New Republic (April 13, 1963): "The script by Evan Hunter... is absolutely bereft of even the slick-magazine sophistication that Hitchcock's films usually have. The dialogue is stupid, the characters insufficiently developed to rank as cliches, the story incohesive... Suzanne Pleshette as a local schoolteacher is unobjectionable. The rest of the cast are offensively bad." - Suomeksi kirjailijalta on myös suomennettu kokoelma Linnut ja muita kertomuksia.
Selected works:
THE LOVING SPIRIT, 1931
I'LL NEVER BE YOUNG AGAIN, 1932
THE PROGRESS OF JULIUS, 1933
GERALD: A PORTRAIT, 1934
JAMAICA INN, 1936 - film 1939, dir. by Alfred Hitchcock, script Sidney Gillant, Joan Harrison, J.B. Priestley - TV serial in 1985
THE DU MAURIERS, 1937
REBECCA, 1938 - (suom. Helvi Vasara) - film 1940, dir. by Alfred Hitchcock, starring Laurence Olivier, Joan Fontaine, George Sanders. Rebecca was one of the top five box-office hits of 1940 and won Academy Awards for Best Picture and Cinematography. However, all reviews were not positive: "Dave Selznick's picture is too tragic and deeply psychological to hit the fancy of wide audience appeal... General audiences will tab it as a long-drawn out drama that could have been told better in less footage." (Variety, March 27. 1940) Du Maurier herself did not like the film, which shifted the locale from Cornwall to America. - TV serial in 1979 and 1997 .
HAPPY CHRISTMAS, 1940
REBECCA, 1940 (play)
COME WIND, COME WEATHER, 1941
FRENCHMAN'S CREEK, 1941 - Merirosvo ja kartanonrouva (suom. Raili Phan-Chan) -The- film 1944, dir. by Mitchell Leisen, starring Joan Fontaine, Arturo de Cordova, Basil Rathbone, Nigel Bruce
HUNGRY HILL, 1943 - Neljänteen sukupolveen (suom. Maija-Liisa Virtanen)
SPRING PICTURE, 1944
THE YEARS BETWEEN, 1944 (play)
LONDON AND PARIS, 1945
THE YEARS BETWEEN, 1945 - film 1946, dir. by Compton Bennett, starring Michael Redgrave, Valerie Hobson, Flora Robson, Felix Aylmer
THE KING'S GENERAL, 1946 - Kuninkaan kenraali (suom. Hilkka Koskiluoma)
HUNGRY HILL, 1947 (screenplay with Terence Young and Francis Crowdy) - film dir. by Brian Desmond Hurst, starring Margaret Lockwood, Dennis Price, Cecil Parker
SEPTEMBER TIDE, 1948 (play)
SEPTEMBER TIDE, 1949
THE PARASITES, 1949 - Kolmen piiri (suom. Kai Kaila)
THE YOUNG GEORGE DU MAURIER, 1951 (ed.)
MY COUSIN RACHEL, 1951 - Serkkuni Raakel (suom. Kyllikki Mäntylä) - film 1952, dir. by Henry Koster, script Nunnally Johnson, starring Olivia de Haviland and Richard Burton
THE APPLE TREE, 1952
MARY ANNE, 1954 - (suom. Maija-Leena Reunanen)
EARLY STORIES, 1954
THE SCAPEGOAT, 1957 - Kaksoisolento (suom. Maija-Leena Reunanen) - film 1958, dir. by Robert Hamer, script Gore Vidal, Robert Hamer, starring Bette Davis, Alec Guinness
THE BREAKING POINT, 1959
THE INFERNAL WORLD OF BRANWELL BRONTË, 1960
THE TREASURY OF DU MAURIER SHORT STORIES, 1960
CASTLE D'OR, 1962 (with Arthur Quiller-Couch)
THE GLASS BLOWERS, 1963 - Lasinpuhaltajat (suom. Kaija Kauppi)
THE FLIGHT OF THE FALCON, 1965 - Haukan lento
VANISHING CORNWALL, 1967
THE HOUSE ON THE STRAND, 1969 - Talo rannalla (suom. Kristiina Kivivuori)
NOT AFTER MIDNIGHT, 1971
RULE BRITANNIA, 1972 - Tapahtui eräänä päivänä (suom. Kristiina Kivivuori)
GOLDEN LADS, 1975
THE BREAKTHROUGH, 1976 (television play)
THE WINDING STAIR: FRANCIS BACON, HIS RISE AND FALL, 1976
ECHOES FROM THE MACABRE, 1976
GROWING PAINS: THE SHAPING OF A WRITER / MYSELF WHEN YOUNG, 1977
FOUR GREAT CORNISH NOVELS, 1978
THE RENDEZVOUS, AND OTHER STORIES, 1980
THE "REBECCA" NOTEBOOK, AND OTHER MEMORIES, 1981
CLASSICS OF THE MACABRE, 1987
MY COUSIN RACHEL, 1990 (play, ed. by Diana Morgan)
ENCHANTED CORNWALL, 1992
DAPHNE DU MAURIER: LETTERS FROM MENABILLY, 1994 (ed. by Oriel Malet)
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