We hope the example of Daphne's family will encourage you to post on this webpage your favourite lines other than the universally well-loved opening to Rebecca. Perhaps you'll be inspired to re-read her books and discover other lines with a special meaning for you.

Virago Press has published almost thirty of Daphne's books in paperback with a delightful hardback edition of Vanishing Cornwall. These have introductions by established authors, some of whom have presented at our Festival and submitted their own favourite lines below.

If you have already REGISTERED as a Member, please use the SUBMIT form to send your favourite lines to us, where they will be reviewed by Ann Willmore.

"Your Favourite Lines" is based on an original idea by Collin Langley.

Deborah Bevan
My Cousin Rachel

'I love the stillness of a room after a party...'
My Cousin Rachel, Ch.12, p.121, Virago (2003).

This line is mirrored in the movie 'Daphne' and is tremendously important. Fabulous.
Deborah Bevan.

Sylvia Wiltshire
Frenchman's Creek

The solitary yachtsman who leaves the yacht in the open roadstead of Helford, and goes exploring up river in his dinghy on a night in midsummer, when the night-jars call, hesitates when he comes upon the mouth of the creek, for there is something of a mystery about it even now, something of enchantment. Being a stranger, the yachtsman looks back over his shoulder to the safe yacht in the roadstead, and to the broad waters of the river, and he pauses, resting on his paddles, aware suddenly of the deep silence of the creek, of its narrow twisting channel, and he feels - for no reason known to him - that he is an interloper, a trespasser in time. He ventures a little way along the left bank of the creek, the sound of the blades upon the water seeming over-loud and echoing oddly amongst the trees on the farther bank, and as he creeps forward the creek narrows, the trees crowd yet more thickly to the water's edge, and he feels a spell upon him, fascinating, strange, a thing of queer excitement not fully understood.

He is alone, and yet - can that be a whisper, in the shallows close to the bank, and does a figure stand there, the moonlight glinting upon his buckled shoes and the cutlass in his hand, and is that a woman by his side, a cloak around her shoulders, her dark ringlets drawn back behind her ears? He is wrong, of course, those are only the shadows of the trees, and the whispers are no more than the rustle of the leaves and the stir of a sleeping bird, but he is baffled suddenly, and a little scared, he feels he must go no farther, and that the head of the creek beyond the farther bank is barred to him and must remain unvisited. And so he turns to go, heading the dinghy's nose for the roadstead, and as he pulls away the sounds and the whispers become more insistent to his ears, there comes the patter of footsteps, a call, and a cry in the night, a far faint whistle, and a curious lilting song. He strains his eyes in the darkness, and the massed shadows before him loom hard and clear like the outline of a ship. A thing of grace and beauty, born in another time, a painted phantom ship.
Frenchman's Creek, Ch.1, p.4/5, Virago (2003).

My husband and I are kindred spirits with the lone yachtsman. On a summer's evening we anchored our boat, La Mouette, in the open roadstead of Helford and rowed the dinghy into the creek. The sun was low in the sky and the trees were casting shadows across the water. The feelings of enchantment and apprehension were those described by Daphne as being felt by the yachtsman. Earlier we had walked the pathway along the east side of the creek. The sun was shining and the water was calm and inviting. Entering the creek by boat was a totally different experience.
Sylvia Wiltshire.

Maureen Freely
Rebecca

'I'm glad I killed Rebecca. I shall never have any remorse for that, never, never. But you. I can't forget what it has done to you. I was looking at you, thinking of nothing else all through lunch. It's gone forever, that funny, young, lost look that I loved. It won't come back again. I killed that too, when I told you about Rebecca… It's gone, in twenty-four hours. You are so much older…'
Rebecca, Ch.21, p335/6, Virago (2003).

I took my seventeen-year old daughter to visit Fowey. During our stay, I bought her a copy of Rebecca, and she read it voraciously. She then passed the book to her three best friends, so quite a bit of time passed by the time the book found its way back to our house. I was interested to discover how powerfully the novel speaks to the new generation. After we had talked about Rebecca for days and days, my daughter and I decided that our favourite passage was the above exchange in which Max tells the narrator that she has lost that innocent look. The passage was particularly important to me in that it had inspired my own novel. My theory was that the narrator could never have remained so innocent for so long had she lived at the end of the 20C. I set out to discover how a story travelling along the same lines as the classic might change its meaning in the hands of a less innocent narrator.
Maureen Freely.

Maureen Freely wrote The Other Rebecca, Bloomsbury Publishing (1996). CL.

Sheila Walsh
Don't Look Now and Other Stories

And he saw the vaporetto with Laura and the two sisters steaming down the Grand Canal, not today, not tomorrow, but the day after that, and he knew why they were together and for what sad purpose they had come. The creature was gibbering in its corner. The hammering and the voices and the barking dog grew fainter, and, 'Oh God,' he thought, 'what a bloody silly way to die…'
Don't Look Now and Other Stories, Don't Look Now, p.55, Penguin (2006).

Few, if any, of Daphne du Maurier's books or stories have conventional endings and I find those with the most final of all particularly enthralling. In The Flight of the Falcon, Aldo Donati's life ends as, Icarus/Lucifer like, he falls from the sky. Again, in The House on the Strand, Dick Young has portents of a shockingly slow death when the telephone falls from his nerveless fingers.
In both cases, as I close these books I, too, experience a sense of falling away. Yet always with a sigh of satisfaction which comes from knowing no sense of disengagement because the characters and events I have read about can be revisited at will and thus will continue to belong to me.
So on that deathly theme, my favourite phrase, startlingly simple, but oh so effective, comes at the end of Don't Look Now. After all the tensions within the story, comes the final macabre paragraph ending with a thought so characteristically sardonic of John, or should I say Daphne, to be so blackly humorous as to make me exclaim and smile. What a great epitaph! I quite fancy it being (eventually!!) on my gravestone…'what a bloody silly way to die…'
Sheila Walsh.

Josie Dolan
My Cousin Rachel

When I stood upon the grass at sunrise, before the servants had wakened and come down to open the shutters and let in the day, I wondered if any man before me had been accepted in marriage in quite so straight a fashion. It would save many a weary courtship if it was always so. Love, and all its trappings, had not concerned me hitherto; men and women must do as best they pleased, I had not cared. I had been blind, and deaf, and sleeping; now, no longer.
What happened on those first hours of my birthday will remain. If there was passion, I have forgotten it. If there was tenderness, it is with me still. Wonder is mine forever, that a woman, accepting love, has no defence. Perhaps this is the secret that they hold to bind us to them. Making reserve of it, until the last.
I would not know, having no other for comparison. She was my first, and last.
My Cousin Rachel, Ch.21, p.253/4, Virago (2003).

I love this because it is the turning point of the novel. It follows Philips's sexual awakening before he is consumed with what transpire to be murderous jealousy and suspicion of Rachel. The writing is beautifully nuanced since it captures the young man's joy whilst also registering wisdom of hindsight of the bitter experience and guilt to come. It really displays to full advantage the economic lyricism of du Maurier at her best.
Josie Dolan.

Collin Langley
The Parasites

Niall looked across the table at Maria. She was no longer Mary Rose, she was no longer anyone. She was the little girl who, nearly thirty years before, had stood at the back of the stalls and watched Mama upon the stage. She had watched Mama, and then turned to the mirrors on the wall, and the gestures that she copied were borrowed, not her own; the hands were the hands of another, so was the smile, so were the dancing feet. The eyes were the eyes of a child who lived in a world of fantasy, of masks, and faces, and scarlet hanging curtains; a child who when she was shown real life became bewildered, frightened, lost.
'No,' said Maria, 'No…'
She got up, and stood looking at Charles, with her hands clasped. The part of an injured wife was one she had never played.
The Parasites, Ch.22, p.296/7, Virago (2005).

This was the moment when the long-suffering Charles finally tells his self-centered wife Maria that he wants a divorce. The preceding metaphor (p.295) Charles uses, Maria having sucked 'the last of that orange' is tinged with du Maurier humour which of course permeates the book.
Maria immediately goes into child mode beautifully illustrated by Daphne's reference to the figure of a little girl. When I first read this passage I accepted this description without further thought. Later, whilst researching Daphne's musical tastes and their influence on her writing, I heard Daphne on BBC Radio's Desert Island Discs choosing eight records to take to the mythical island. Record number four was Ravel's Pavane pour une Infante Défunte. Daphne told BBC's Roy Plomley that this music evoked a painting by Velásquez, of 'a little infanta with her hands cupped as though she was dancing, I think she was Phillip 4th's daughter.' The picture re-emerges in The Parasites even down to the scarlet curtains.
The 17C Velázquez portrait of the Infanta Magarita, age 5, is in the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna and can be found on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margarita_Teresa_of_Spain .
Curiously, the Pavane also features throughout a film of Rebecca.
Collin Langley.

Dianne Armstrong
Jamaica Inn

'…Yes, I am a freak in nature and a freak in time. I do not belong here, and I was born with a grudge against the age… Peace is very hard to find in the nineteenth century. The silence is gone, even on the hills.'
Jamaica Inn, Ch.17, p.274, Virago (2003).

'There's no peace, Jem, in wandering, and no quiet. Heaven knows that existence itself is a long enough journey, without adding to the burden…'
Jamaica Inn, Ch.18, p.299, Virago (2003).


To the casual reader, two of Jamaica Inn's characters, Mary Yellan and Francis Davey, the Vicar of Altarnun, have little in common. They are separated by gender roles and authority, class, and social station as well as other markers of privilege. But these same factors make him conventionally the most likely of her rescuers. Du Maurier very successfully reverses that expectation, of course. Still, on the most fundamental spiritual level, both Mary and the Vicar have a similar yearning for certain qualities in life that I believe enables them to share sympathies.
In their long conversation toward the end of the book, Mary discovers the vicar's true character. Ironically, then, what binds both the vicar and Mary together though other values in due course separate them is neither the superficial nor material but a longing for tranquility, 'the peace that passeth all understanding,' in the words of The Book of Common Prayer. I wonder if du Maurier found the twentieth century equally as disturbing in terms of achieving that inner peace as the vicar did his own time.
Dianne Armstrong (USA).

Dianne published an article on Jamaica Inn in Women's Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal, Volume 38, Issue 1, (2009), published by Taylor & Francis (UK). Single copies can be purchased by calling the publishers. CL.

A du Maurier Fan
Don't Look Now and Other Stories

'Don't look now,' John said to his wife, 'but there are a couple of old girls two tables away who are trying to hypnotise me.'
Don't Look Now and Other Stories, Don't Look Now, p.7, Penguin (2006).

The creature was gibbering in its corner. The hammering and the voices and the barking dog grew fainter, and, 'Oh God,' he thought, 'what a bloody silly way to die…'
Don't Look Now and Other Stories, Don't Look Now, p.55, Penguin (2006)

The famous opening and closing lines from Daphne's short story Don't Look Now have always appealed to me. She uses the creative writer's technique of beginning a story with action that just grabs your interest immediately. Venice is the ideal setting for a supernatural tale as any visitor will tell you. Wander the dank, poorly lit streets after dark and you can imagine that only obsession would have driven John to chase the mad, red coated, dwarf that represents his lost daughter. The surprise story ending typifies so many of Daphne's short stories for example, Panic from The Rendezvous & Other Stories, p.46, Virago (2005) and Picadilly from Early Stories, p.85, Todd (1955).
A du Maurier Fan.