The friendship flourished for thirty years, fed by the letters that arrived faithfully from Menabilly, the du Maurier house in Cornwall. While Oriel tasted life on a houseboat on the Seine and mixed with the artistic Who’s Who of Paris, Daphne’s letters tell of her family, past and present, her marriage to General Sir Frederick Browning—a war hero known privately as “Moper,” whose fits of melancholy caused many a crisis at Menabilly—and events like Prince Philip coming for dinner: “We’ve got only four knives with handles, and one silver candlestick must be glued!” Most of all, though, her letters are a valuable record of the complex and rigorous art of a fine and well-loved writer: the “brewing” of a plot, the research, and the “pegging” of secret fantasies onto a living person in order to create classic characters such as Cousin Rachel and Roger Klymerth.
Daphne du Maurier was born in 1906 and educated at home and in Paris. She began writing in 1928, and many of her bestselling novels were set in Cornwall, where she lived for most of her life. She was made a DBE in 1969 and died in 1989.
