Daphne du Maurier: Venetian tendencies

In November 1947, Daphne du Maurier fell in love with a woman. It wasn't the first time, nor would it be the last. But it was to be the most surprising to du Maurier herself. The affair she had already had, with a teacher at her finishing school in Paris, was 20 years behind her, and she considered herself more or less what she seemed to be to the outside world: a successful writer, a mother, and, an affair or two notwithstanding, a wife. Her nemesis was Ellen Doubleday, the wife of du Maurier's US publisher, Nelson Doubleday, and the way in which they met, according to Margaret Forster's excellent 1993 biography, Daphne, only added to the shock.

Du Maurier had been sued over alleged plagiarism in her 1938 novel Rebecca, and had to travel to the US to answer those charges in court. She went by sea, on the Queen Mary. Two days into the journey, Doubleday knocked on her cabin door. Du Maurier "stared at her speechless, then sank down on her bunk", Forster writes. "In a letter she wrote to Ellen six weeks later, when she was back in England, she described how overcome she had been and how she had instantly been transported back 20 years in time until she was 'a boy of 18 all over again with nervous hands and a beating heart, incurably romantic and wanting to throw a cloak before his lady's feet...'. Her feelings of excitement were mixed with ones close to terror."

We can thank Ellen Doubleday for two things. Firstly, she lived abroad. Secondly, she wasn't gay, and though she became very fond of du Maurier, she made it clear that she was not going to sleep with her. Those two things resulted in an outpouring of frustrated, intense letters from du Maurier to Doubleday that tell us a great deal about her conflicted feelings about the attraction she felt for women. Read what she has to say in the letters, and then reread her novels, and they take on a whole new meaning. In Rebecca, in particular, phrases and images du Maurier used to Doubleday leap out at you, even though the novel was written nearly a decade earlier.

The idea that she was really a boy, not a woman, is one that du Maurier returns to over and over again. She had grown up, she writes to Doubleday, "with a boy's mind and a boy's heart... so that at 18, this half-breed fell in love, as a boy would, with someone quite 12 years older than himself... and he loved her in every conceivable way. And then the boy realised he had to grow up, and not be a boy any longer, so he turned into a girl, and the boy was locked in the box forever. D du M wrote her books, and had young men, and later a husband, and children, and a lover, but... she opened up the box sometimes and let the phantom, who was neither boy nor girl but disembodied spirit, dance in the evening when there was no one to see."

The boy's abrupt reappearance threw her into turmoil, she writes: "I pushed the boy back into his box again and avoided you on the boat like the plague... You looked lovelier every day. It just defeated me." But however much in love du Maurier was, Doubleday was not under any circumstances to think she was a lesbian. "By God and by Christ, if anyone should call that love by that unattractive word that begins with 'L', I'd tear their guts out."

Ironically, du Maurier was something of a homophobe. "Nobody could be more bored with all the L people than I am," she writes. "I like to think my Jack-in-the-box was, and is, unique." But this "uniqueness" brought with it anguished self-doubt: "Disembodied spirits like myself are all wrong," she wails to Doubleday at one point, and "my life has been one long lie for as far back as I can remember" at another. She wears many masks, she writes, but is in the end "merely the person dancing alone in the long room, thumbing my nose at the world". Not even Doubleday was exempt from mockery: after visiting her in the US, du Maurier writes, cruelly: "I am shaking with silent laughter most of the time, but you are probably not aware of it."

Du Maurier's love affairs with women are common knowledge now. But they weren't during du Maurier's lifetime. It was only after she died in 1989 that Forster's biography made her sexuality public. Forster writes, in a new, revised edition released as part of the centenary of du Maurier's birth, 100 years ago today, that du Maurier's children still find their mother's bisexuality hard to accept. Perhaps the fact that du Maurier kept it hidden for so long, however, is not surprising, since she was a secretive woman who struggled to understand it herself. She describes sexual feelings evasively, using code words and euphemisms, "the L word" being but one example. An attractive person she termed "a menace" (note the suggestion of threat); foreplay was "spinning", to have sex was "to wax", sex with men was "Cairo", sex with women "Venice". She wouldn't name things by their name. In one of her later letters to Doubleday, though, she admits that she preferred "Venice" to "Cairo", because she felt more confident with it. "Truly, truly, I should have been born a boy. Don't you think? ... Nothing is more amusing than to have fun with glamorous or menacing men, but that's a diversion, it's not home ... What is strongest in you comes out in the middle years. [I have] gone back to nature."

So to Rebecca, which remains du Maurier's most admired work along with her short stories "The Birds" and "Don't Look Now", all subsequently turned into brilliant films, all peerless examples of her talent for creating a sharp, atmospheric sense of place and a pervading suggestion of disturbance and threat. Rebecca is sometimes mistakenly seen as a romance, probably because du Maurier was at times marketed as a writer of romances, which infuriated her. She herself said it was a study of jealousy based on her feelings for her husband.

The plot, partly thanks to the 1941 Hitchcock adaptation, is well known. A shy young woman, the narrator of the book, who remains nameless throughout, meets a rich man, Max de Winter, marries him and is whisked back to his country pile in Cornwall, Manderley (based on du Maurier's own country pile in Cornwall, Menabilly). Here, feeling inadequate to the task of being the lady of the house, particularly in the face of hostility from the sinister housekeeper, Mrs Danvers, she becomes obsessed with the thought of her husband's first wife, the beautiful, charismatic Rebecca, who had drowned only a year before. She convinces herself that her husband still loves Rebecca.

But far from being a demure wife, it turns out, Rebecca was a sexually free spirit who held the bonds of marriage in contempt. We aren't told what she got up to: Max de Winter won't give it a name. But "she was not even normal", he says, savagely. "I don't want to tell you about [those years], the lie we lived, she and I." If he is repulsed, however, Danvers is admiring. Rebecca's close companion and maid for many years, "Danny" is clearly still in love with her. Rebecca "had all the courage and spirit of a boy", Danvers says. "She ought to have been a boy." Rebecca's affairs with men meant nothing, Danvers insists: "She despised all men.... Lovemaking was a game to her, only a game. She did it because it made her laugh. I've known her come back and sit upstairs in her bed and rock with laughter at the lot of you."

What has happened to Rebecca, this vital, forceful creature who we are told had the face of a beautiful boy, who went through life shaking with silent laughter, thumbing her nose at the world? Before the novel even starts, she has been killed, locked in a box forever - the tiny cabin of her boat - and buried beneath the sea. Du Maurier may have raved "to hell with psychoanalysis", but that's as clear an image of repression as you can get. It fails, as repression fails: the attempt to blot out Rebecca has only made her stronger. Though dead, she still dominates the book. She is the centre around which the thoughts of the others constantly revolve. Even the boat her body lies in is called Je Reviens ("I will return"). Her presence haunts Manderley, where it is felt in every room: the second wife sees her possessions, her taste, as "vividly alive, having something of the glow of the rhododendrons... rich and glowing in the morning sun".

The second wife's growing obsession with Rebecca, which du Maurier claimed was jealousy, begins to seem curiously like desire as the book proceeds. For one, there's a preoccupation with Rebecca's physical attributes, which she cannot seem to control. "Wherever I walked in Manderley, wherever I sat, even in my thoughts and in my dreams, I met Rebecca," she says. "I knew her figure now, the long slim legs, the small and narrow feet. Her shoulders, broader than mine, the strong and clever hands... If I heard it, even among a thousand others, I should recognise her voice. Rebecca, always Rebecca." In a telling episode, she goes on the sly to inspect what had been Rebecca's bedroom, "my heart beating in a queer excited way". Once there, she begins to fondle Rebecca's intimate possessions. She notes that the room smelt "queer" - that word again. At that moment the door opens and in comes Danvers, "triumphant, gloating, excited in a strange unhealthy way". Danvers comes nearer. "Now you are here let me show you everything," she says. "'I know you want to see it all, you've wanted to for a long time, and you were too shy to ask.' She took hold of my arm, and walked me towards the bed. I could not resist her." But Danvers doesn't thrust the wife on to the bed and have her evil way with her, as you might expect. Instead, she talks obsessively about Rebecca. "I did everything for her, you know..." The mood darkens as Danvers describes the night of Rebecca's death, then becomes intimate again: "When Mr De Winter is away, and you feel lonely, you might like to come to these rooms and sit here ... I feel her everywhere. You do too, don't you?"

Though this scene pulses with the narrator's "queer" excitement, there's dread, too, and distaste: far be it from du Maurier to admit to "that unattractive word that begins with L". Danvers, in other words, is a threatening character because she represents what du Maurier thought of as a threatening thing. She, like Rebecca, is "a menace". She is often described as looking dead, a "black figure" with a "skull's face" and "hollow eyes". That is partly because she is, in one sense, a dead woman: her heart is in the grave with Rebecca. Like the second wife, who feels herself to be a ghost, and Rebecca herself, Danvers is a "disembodied spirit", "all wrong".

With all this, it's perhaps surprising that heterosexuality wins in the end. Or does it? After all, Max de Winter and his bride are forced into exile in a foreign land, where they fritter away their time in dull routines, talking about cricket. They lose Manderley, which stands for many things, among them class, privilege, marriage, domesticity, all destroyed, burned to the ground by an enraged lesbian (who gets away scot-free, too, in contrast to the film). In fact, Manderley can be seen as another box: a grandiose box, but a box nonetheless, in which the second wife feels herself to be buried. It's under threat from the start, in the famous opening passage - "Last night I dreamed I went to Manderley again" - in which the second wife sees the trees and plants around the house encroaching on it menacingly, having gone "half-breed" and grown enormous, taking on sexual shapes: "The beeches with white, naked limbs leant close to one another, their branches intermingled in a strange embrace." Nature, she says, "had come into her own again ... The garden had obeyed the jungle law."

As did du Maurier ... almost. Sadly, she maintained her distaste for "the L people" to the end of her life. At the time she wrote Rebecca, she believed her "Venetian" tendencies to be under control, put aside in favour of marriage. Ironically, it was Rebecca that led to her meeting with Ellen Doubleday, abruptly reviving those buried impulses (which, happily, subsequently found some fulfilment in her affair with the actress Gertrude Lawrence). Rebecca, it seems to me, owes its emotional force to those half-stifled longings, which run counter to the book's overtly heterosexual themes, but which, like Rebecca, refuse to die. You can put the boy in his box, and the wife in her house, but the truth will out in the end.

'Daphne' by Margaret Forster is published by Arrow at £9.99. 'The Daphne du Maurier Companion', ed Helen Taylor, is published by Virago at £9.99. To buy copies (free p&p), contact Independent Books Direct on 08700 798 897

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