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Their father, something of a Peter Pan himself, did not want anyone to grow up. Angela was 12 before she learned that Father Christmas did not exist. Daphne, in spite of flirtations which involved kisses, did not know the facts of life until she was 18. The atmosphere at opulent Cannon Hall in Hampstead was overwhelmingly histrionic, everyone dressing up and pretending to be someone else, the girls conditioned to be equally theatrical in their responses to the everyday. Shyness or holding back was ‘bad manners’.
Small wonder, given their father’s flamboyantly narcissistic personality and his weakness for young actresses, that their mother was cool, withdrawn and undemonstrative — as Daphne, the only one of the three to marry, was to be with her own two daughters, though not with her son. Daphne was the beauty, the brilliant one, her father’s favourite.
Group biographies are tricky to stage-manage. The author has to play catch-up, giving each subject her due, especially as Daphne’s fame and career, with her best-selling novels and the ensuing films, were so much more dramatic than her sisters’. She made masses of money, and helped her siblings out. Angela too wrote books — 11 of them, and some of the novels would be worth reissuing. But in life she was doomed to be ‘only the sister’; It’s Only the Sister is the title of one of her two autobiographical volumes.
Angela was also the most extrovert of the three and would have married, if a willing man had come along. As it was, ‘her ecstatic, worshipful nature turned her reflective powers on women instead’. Both she and Jeanne worked on the land during the second world war, digging potato fields and cleaning out cowsheds. Jeanne went to art school and found her metier after the war as a painter, exhibiting at the Royal Academy and the Paris Salon, and was a distinguished member of the St Ives Society of Artists; one purpose of this book is to restore Jeanne’s once considerable reputation. She converted to Catholicism, and with a younger woman partner made her final home and garden in an ancient house on Dartmoor.
The book proceeds with leisurely amplitude, as Dunn takes the scenic route through her mass of material, generous with authorial asides and comments, and with some repetition of key insights and quotations. Not a friendship, not a holiday — and there are lots of holidays, and lots of friendships — is given the go-by.
There is a supporting cast of interesting women to whom all three sisters, variously, became passionately attached — Tod the governess, also Betty, Micky, Molly, Bo, Brigit, Mary, Marda, Gwen, Lena, Olive, Gertie, Anne, Ellen, Dod, Noel, do keep up, whom have I missed out? — some of them distinguished in the theatre, art or literary world, some rich and famous, some neither, some just rich (gifts of wristwatches, trouser-presses, the odd fur coat).
The more you learn about upper-middle-class English life in the first half of the 20th century, the more you find (as well as silly nicknames) this sustaining undertow of intense, passionate relationships between women running beneath the conventional world of engagements and marriages. Often the men, to quote St Mark, seem ‘as trees, walking’ — an emotional deficit to do with public-school education and the experience of two world wars, perhaps. Yet the du Maurier sisters abhorred ‘the L word’. They were all as conventionally homophobic in theory as they were up for anything in practice.
The definitive setting for the ongoing drama of their lives was Cornwall. In the 1920s their parents bought a holiday house on Fowey harbour, Ferryside, where after their father’s death they lived full time. Daphne first saw Menabilly, the deserted romantic house in the woods, when she was 21, and later leased it for 25 years. ‘Her work may suffer under the spell of Rebecca, but she would now have Rebecca’s house and it would be hers alone. Menabilly was Daphne’s Manderley and her love for it was more powerful than her love for any man.’
She proposed to Major — later Lieutenant-General — Frederick ‘Boy’ Browning, whom she called Tommy, because, like her, he loved Cornwall and sailing, and avoided people. ‘Love at first sight’, writes Dunn, ‘is an interesting phenomenon that always involves an element of narcissism.’ I am not sure if that is true. In any case, Daphne had not reckoned with life as the wife of a Guards officer who became a war hero and then Comptroller of Princess Elizabeth’s household, then Treasurer to Prince Philip, with an office in Buckingham Palace. A week she spent at Balmoral seemed ‘the longest week I ever spent on my life’. She was a solitary, addictively immersed in her writing, the women in her life providing ‘pegs’ for the creation of her fictional characters. Tommy became depressed and alcohol-dependent. Daphne did her best for him, but it was a strain.
Depression dogged the sisters too, when grey reality challenged their fantastical imaginative universe. Retreating into their private citadels, they all ‘brought down the curtain’ on their lives unnecessarily early. Angela, the eldest, survived the longest, dying aged 97 in 2002. With this book the curtain rises again on the family drama.
Because you read about biography
Also by Victoria Glendinning
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