[In the following review, Kemp provides an overview of Daphne du Maurier's life and commends Forster's biography of the author as perceptive and revealing.]

On a French walking holiday with Daphne du Maurier in 1952, a friend fascinatedly noted her habit of wearing “a zip linen skirt on top of white cotton shorts.” Out in the countryside, she unzipped the skirt and “strode forward like a boy.” Whenever villages were near, she zipped it back into place so that she “was feminine.” This outfit and her use of it could be seen—Margaret Forster's perceptive and revealing biography [Daphne du Maurier] makes clear—as a sartorial symbol of how du Maurier made her way through most of her life.

Doubleness was early impressed on her. The favourite daughter of the actor-manager, Gerald du Maurier, she soon became a surrogate for the son he thwartedly longed for: in a bizarre poem addressed to the young Daphne, he proclaims “she should have been / And, if I'd had my way, / She would have been, a boy.” As if to allay this paternal disappointment, Daphne, hair bobbed short, preferred to be togged out in boys' shorts, shirts and ties and heavy schoolboy socks and shoes. She fantasized that she had an alter ego, Eric Avon, who went to Rugby where he shone at games and became Captain of Cricket. Eventually, she convinced herself—a conviction she clung to for life—that she was really a male somehow trapped inside a female body.

Unsurprisingly, when dispatched just before her eighteenth birthday to be finished at a school near Paris, Daphne proved keenly receptive to the advances of one of the establishment's teachers, Mlle Fernande Yvon (a Colette-ish figure with slanting green eyes, sarcastic wit and a dress sense that ran to Chanel chic, according to Oriel Malet's account in her rather gushy du Maurier memoir-cum-correspondence, Letters from Menabilly). While exulting that this Sapphic instructress made love to her “in every conceivable way,” Daphne emphasized, however, that her own behaviour was not lesbian, since essentially she was “a boy.”

Like much of her life, this strange contortion—to accommodate her eagerness to appear conventional while privately being otherwise—seems traceable back to the family home, Cannon Hall, a handsome Queen Anne property overlooking Hampstead Heath. There, Forster shows, the decorous duplicity characteristic of the Edwardian era was assiduously kept up. While Gerald—the debonair theatre idol just starting to slide towards depression and the doldrums—philandered and drank, Muriel, his imperturbable wife, acquitted herself with flawless propriety as the perfect hostess. As the du Maurier daughters soon became aware, there were other contrasts between their parents' social and private demeanour: exuding charm to their guests, they were scathingly satirical about them once they had left. The lesson that unwelcome facts and other people could be kept at arm's length by resolutely impeccable manners was one Daphne thoroughly assimilated. The self-absorption that emerges from Forster's book as her central feature was sheathed in a carapace of impermeable correctness. She also readily absorbed the du Maurier custom of communicating in slangy code—to such an extent that Malet's edition of her letters requires a glossary of codewords and nicknames. Even with the aid of it, decoding the “wain” or “honky,” “See Me” or “Tell Him” doings of the likes of Doodie and Kicky, Piffy and Poonie, Moper, Gyggy, Tod, Boo and Bee soon gets wearisome.

Though the du Mauriers occupied a bohemianish branch of the upper class, they often shared the accents of its heartier circles. These are audible in Daphne's expressed desire to conform: “I may as well run the race with the rest of the pack instead of being a damned solitary hound missing the game.” There were other obstacles than her inner “boy” to her determination to embrace heterosexual orthodoxy on her return from France, though. When she and her two sisters were young, life had often seemed a theatrical wonderland where starry creatures flitted enchantingly in and out: “Uncle Jim”—J. M. Barrie—played with them in the nursery; there were backstage rendezvous with Ivor Novello and “Fondest love, darling” telegrams from Gladys Cooper. Once the girls started to attract boyfriends, however, an atmosphere of murky melodrama descended on Cannon Hall. Gerald, pathologically jealous, poured out tirades of furious abuse and pruriently spied on them: a pattern of morbid infatuation, Forster points out, that is given a heightened re-play in Daphne's lurid third novel, The Progress of Julius, where a father harasses and chokes to death his androgynously named daughter, Gabriel.

It wasn't only psychologically and emotionally that Daphne's fiction provided release. She won permission to live in the family's holiday home in Fowey if she could earn enough by her pen to support herself. This instilled an association of writing with financial autonomy that became one of her most dominant concerns (even as royalties lavishly flow in, her letters twitch with agitation about income tax and dread of “sliding into ruin”). Efficiently charting the stages by which du Maurier's career as a romantic best-selling author established itself, Forster simultaneously draws attention to the blatant motifs repetitively stamped on her early novels and stories: the recurrent juxtaposing of menaced female figures with overbearing men; heroines who routinely lament that they were not born “a boy,” but sometimes gain fleeting access to the sphere of male action and liberty.

The man Daphne married—after he sailed into Fowey harbour on his cruiser, Ygdrasil—seemed to have all the robust masculinity her fiction was fixated on. A Grenadier Guards officer decorated for bravery on the Western Front, an Olympic high-hurdler and bob-sleigher for England, Major “Tommy” Browning appeared admirably suited to her purposes. In his case as in hers, though, the exterior was deceptive. Behind his stalwart mien, Tommy was still racked with trauma from the First World War: nightmares about it regularly caused him to wake sobbing and screaming. Daphne's response to this was infused with both indignation and repulsion. When, after the Second World War, Tommy—in no small part because of their now totally intimacy-less marriage—had a breakdown, she complained severely to Oriel Malet “that someone whom I respected and loved should have no sort of backbone, and be indeed a pitiful, weak, sick figure.”

Even in earlier years when they looked a golden couple, there were tensions. As an officer's wife, Daphne was expected to share social duties, which she loathed and performed with clenched charmingness. When Tommy was posted to Egypt, things became even more irksome. Alexandria was “ghastly,” full of “horrible Manchester folk.” “Imagine the sham buildings of Wembley suddenly placed in a very dreary sea-side resort like St Leonards-on-Sea that by some unfortunate chance had been invaded by half-castes,” she reported. As for the Pyramids, “just like a couple of slag heaps, my dear.”

To add to Daphne's dismay, her first two children—treated with considerable off-handedness—were daughters. It wasn't until the birth of her son, Kits, in 1940, that true to her mystique about masculinity (“I have done it at last … a son!”), she found motherhood of much interest. In the oppressive Alexandria of 1937, though, she produced what was to be her most memorable creation. Fingers sticking to the typewriter keys in the sweltering heat, she pounded out Rebecca, the bestseller that would buy for her independence and the lease of the house, Menabilly, that she used as the book's haunting setting, Manderley.

In a letter to Oriel Malet, du Maurier confirms of the book's narrator, “Yes, the I in Rebecca was me.” But what gives this gothic imbroglio its intensity is surely that it houses both of her personas. The second Mrs. de Winter is the conventional du Maurier, conscious of acting a part, feeling almost an impostor on social occasions. Rebecca is the reason for this unease. She was “not even normal,” it's disclosed, and has had a sensualist past. Though none of this is made explicitly homosexual, Mrs. Danvers, rigid with lesbian possessiveness and obsessiveness, still passionately devoted to the dead Rebecca, derisively asserts that “She despised all men. She was above all that.” “Love-making was a game with her, only a game,” Mrs. Danvers insists: du Maurier's letters frequently liken heterosexual love-making to tennis.

With Rebecca, du Maurier most successfully deployed her chief fictional device: the jolting revelation of threat behind a pleasing exterior. It's a technique she ceaselessly recycled. In her story, “The Little Photographer,” a gracious marquise is exposed as a lustful murderess. In “The Birds,” feathered friends veer round into beaked and clawed killers. “Don't Look Now” has a little girl turning out to be a homicidal dwarf. The creepiness of Cousin Rachel, du Maurier said, would come from the reader's inability to discern “whether the woman is an angel or a devil.”

The disruptiveness which keeps bursting from behind decorous façades in her fiction also did so on one major occasion in her later life, Forster tells: a coup de foudre episode when she fell violently in love with Ellen Doubleday, the wife of her American publisher. Since Ellen was not “Venetian”—du-Maurier-speak for homosexual—the desires this aroused were assuaged by ingenious proxy. First, Daphne channelled her feelings for Ellen into a play, September Tide. Then, she embarked on an affair with the woman who played the Ellen role in it: Gertrude Lawrence who—adding a further kink—had been “the last of Daddy's actress loves.”

Drawn to Gertrude “like an alcoholic who must get to the bottle or bust,” as she not altogether happily phrased it, Daphne enjoyed an ecstatic holiday romping in Florida with her. Given this, there's something particularly unappealing in her later protestations of horror to Oriel Malet about the film industry's preoccupation with sex: “and it has to be perverted sex at that—homos, lesbians, incest etc. Honestly, what is left!” Along with such loud hypocrisy, self-deception can make itself heard. The attempted seduction of Ellen proceeded to the accompaniment of vehement assurances that what was going on was in no way lesbian: “by God and by Christ if anyone should call that sort of love by the unattractive word that begins with ‘L,’ I'd tear their guts out.” What had occurred, Daphne maintained, was that she had become “a boy of eighteen again.”

Du Maurier's urge to shut out unwelcome actualities increasingly led her to cloister herself in Menabilly, her Cornish “House of Secrets,” out of the way, screened by trees, its windows swathed with ivy. Matching this, her mind seems to have always been happiest when turned in on itself. The self-engrossment to which both of these books testify—one studiously, one inadvertently—meant that her awareness of events in the outside world could be minimal. During the General Strike, she observed, “nothing much happened beyond the fact that buses and tubes were driven by good-looking undergraduates … what is really happening and what it is about nobody has the slightest idea.” In similar vein, vacuous optimism sometimes surfaces in her correspondence: “Something will be invented to neutralise the bomb,” “everything that goes wrong in the world is through some false emotion—Hitler, strikes, anything.” In her final decades, this gives way to copious ventings of an air of grievance at the “general slackness” in the country caused by “these left-wing types and miners and so on.”

Her last years were ones of almost adamantine reclusiveness. Her death at the age of eighty-one—brought on by a refusal to eat—seems in a way the culmination of a progressive shrinking from substantial sources of human sustenance. It's this that gives both these books, despite the sharp acuteness of the one and the slightly scatty effusiveness of the other, an ultimately bleak feel.