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.

Caroline Metcalfe
My Cousin Rachel

They used to hang men at Four Turnings in the old days. Not any more, though.
…Tom Jenkyn, battered specimen of humanity, unrecognisable and unlamented, did you, all those years ago, stare after me in pity as I went running down the woods into the future?
They used to hang men at Four Turnings in the old days. Not any more, though.
My Cousin Rachel, Ch.1, p.1, 7 & Ch.26, p.335, Virago (2003).

I love the beginning and ending of My Cousin Rachel. Caroline Metcalfe.

Festivalgoer
The Parasites

Someone from a newspaper had telephoned him the other day. 'Mr Delaney, we are running a series shortly in our paper, “What Success has done for Me.” Can we have your contribution?' No, they could not have his contribution. All success had done for him was to make it impossible to pay his super-tax. 'But what is your recipe, Mr Delaney, for the short road to success?' Mr Delaney had no recipe.

Success. Well, what did it mean, to him? Supposing he had answered the newspaper and spoken the truth? A song burning in his head for two days until he had written it down, when he was purged; when he was free again. Until the next pain came. And the performance was repeated. The disillusion came when the songs were plugged upon the air, moaned by crooners, whispered by wailing women, clanged by orchestras, hummed by housemaids; so that what had been once his little private pain became, to put it bluntly, everyone's diarrhoea. Which was cheapening and intolerable. Negroes offered thousands for the rights to sing his songs. God! The cheques that had rolled in from coloured crooners. Too many cheques, all in one year. Niall had to attend conferences in the City with hard-faced men round desks, all because of some little song that had come into his head one afternoon, when lying on his back in the sun. How to escape? Travel. He could always travel.
The Parasites, Ch.19, p.259/260, Virago (2005).

With the three main characters, Maria, Niall and Celia each facets of Daphne, the autobiographic influences have always fascinated me. More evidence of the light and shade in her writing, here we glimpse Daphne's wonderful humour alongside more solemn reflections. The less palatable price of fame is portrayed, doubtless based on personal experience. Daphne's own intolerable tax situation; (£22,500 on an income of £25,000 in 1942-enough to buy a Lancaster bomber! she once observed: Daphne du Maurier by Margaret Forster, Ch.11, p. 173/4, Arrow (2007). What better example of HMG's most parasitic agency, a cruel irony in Daphne's case. And then the unrelenting public acclaim. Oh dear Daphne! But at least you were spared the worst excesses of paparazzi! Festivalgoer.

Government records show maximum UK marginal rates of income tax and super-tax in 1948 of 97.5%. If this wasn't bad enough, up to a further 50% special contribution could be levied on investment income. This puts Daphne's constant monetary concerns into perspective! CL.

Susan Strachan
Mary Anne

Then away they went, out of the dark alley where the sun never shone, through the maze of small courts adjoining, and so into Chancery Lane and down into Fleet Street.
This was another world, and one she loved, full of colour and sound and smell, but not the smell of the alley. Here people jostled one another on the pavement, here the traffic rumbled on towards Ludgate Hill and St. Pauls, the carters cracking their whips and shouting, drawing their horses to the side of the road as a coach passed, splattering mud. Here a fine gentleman would step out of his chair to visit a bookshop, while a woman selling lavender thrust a bunch under his nose, and there on the opposite side a cart overtipped, spilling apples and oranges, tumbling into the gutter a blind musician and an old man mending a chair.
Mary Anne, Part 1, Ch.2, p.14/5, Virago (2004).

She heard a sound behind her. The screen was moving, the whole thing folding back, displaying doors - and doors that were open to a room within. Leaning against the doors a man was standing, hands in the lapels of his coat, legs crossed. Height about six foot two, florid complexion, prominent blue eyes, a largish nose, age – roughly - forty. His face she recognised at once with a sinking heart, seen fifty, a hundred times, in papers, pamphlets. A face that was waved to from a crowd of a thousand others, the wave acknowledged, salute to the hat, and finish. Now it was far too close and personal for comfort. Frederick Augustus, Duke of York and Albany.
Mary Anne, Part 2, Ch.2, p.118/9, Virago (2004).

Daphne has been quoted as having a fascination with ancestry and so wrote about one of hers; Mary Anne. A sense of place sets the scene in my first extract and later in my second. Susan Strachan.

Susan Strachan
The Scapegoat

In Blois, in the châteaux, feeling the smoke-blackened walls with my hands, a thousand people might ache and suffer a few hundred yards away but I saw none of them. For there beside me would be Henry III, perfumed and bejewelled, touching my shoulder with a velvet glove, a lapdog in the crook of his arm as though he nursed a child; and the false charm of his crafty feminine face was plainer to me than the mask of the gaping tourist at my side, fumbling for a sweet in a paper-bag, while a waited for a footstep, for a cry, and for the Duc de Guise to die.
The Scapegoat, Ch.1, p.2, Virago (2004).

Someone jolted my elbow and I drank and said 'Je vous demande pardon,' and as I moved to give him space he turned and stared at me and I at him, and I realised, with a strange sense of shock and fear and nausea all combined, that his face and voice were known to me too well.
I was looking at myself.
The Scapegoat, Ch.1, p.9, Virago (2004).

My favourite quote of all time is, like for many others, the opening line of Rebecca, followed by much of The Loving Spirit which kept me forever in Polruan long before I came here to live full time. In fact much of Daphne's Cornish prose transports one here immediately on reading as the love she felt for Cornwall leaps out of the page and into your mind as you can see exactly where she means you to be. Because of her excellent sense of place I found she has done this in other of her novels coupled with a fascination for history and a love of France as in The Scapegoat. Susan Strachan.

Sam Rimington
The Rebecca Notebook & Other Memories

...when my husband died in March of this past year it was as though the sheltered cloudland that had enveloped me for years…suddenly dissolved …The husband I had loved and taken for granted for thirty-three years of married life, father of my three children lay dead…
I should have observed…that his eyes followed me with greater intensity,…How heartless, in retrospect, my last night, when he murmured to me, "I can't sleep", and I kissed him and said, "You will, darling, you will", and went from the room…if I had sat with him all night, the morning would have been otherwise. …when morning came, and the nurses…expressed some anxiety about his pallor and asked me to telephone the doctor, I went through to him expecting possibly an increase of weakness, but inevitably the usual smile. Instead…he turned his face to me, and died.
...What had to be endured must be endured…alone…
To ease the pain…I wore his shirts…used his pens to acknowledge the hundreds of letters…felt closer to him.
Yet I had seen his empty shell. I had seen the light flicker and go out. Where had it gone? ...does each one of us, in the end, vanish into darkness? If this is so, and our dreams of survival after death are only dreams, then we must accept this too…with courage. To have lived at all is a measure of immortality; …It is as though every human being born into this world burns, for a brief moment, like a star, and because of it a pinpoint of light shines in the darkness, and so there is glory, so there is life. If there is nothing more than this we have achieved our immortality. The Rebecca Notebook and Other Memories, Death and Widowhood (1966), p.123, 124, 125, 126, 127, Virago (2004).

In this much reduced quotation, (my last for now, and my deepest 'favourite', if that is the correct word!), I hear Daphne talking, her clear voice, and witness her gallant demeanor, facing the inevitable conclusion which time brings. Her love and grief for her husband's loss is there for all, who will, to see. She obviously faced the possibility of their not knowingly meeting again; that their lives together revealed their only certain immortality. I find Daphne's clear sighted bravery deeply moving. Sam Rimington.

Piers Dudgeon
Rebecca

I was writing letters in the morning-room. I was sending out invitations. I wrote them all myself with a thick black pen. But when I looked down to see what I had written it was not my small square handwriting at all, it was long and slanting, with curious pointed strokes. I pushed the cards away from the blotter and hid them. I got up and went to the looking-glass. A face stared back at me that was not my own. It was very pale, very lovely, framed in a cloud of dark hair. The eyes narrowed and smiled. The lips parted. The face in the glass stared back at me and laughed. And I saw then that she was sitting on a chair before the dressing-table in her bedroom, and Maxim was brushing her hair. He held her hair in his hands, and as he brushed it he wound it slowly into a thick rope. It twisted like a snake, and he took hold of it with both hands and smiled at Rebecca and put it round his neck.
Rebecca, Ch.27, p.426, Virago (2003).

Daphne deployed her imagination not only as a divining rod of beauty and mystery, but also as an instrument of alchemy to transform her own life. She transmuted the dull, wifely Mrs de Winter into the avatar Rebecca. Piers Dudgeon.

Piers Dudgeon is the editor and co-publisher of Daphne du Maurier: Enchanted Cornwall – Her Pictorial Memoir, Penguin Group (1989) and author of Captivated: J.M. Barrie, the du Mauriers, and the dark side of Neverland, Chatto & Windus (2008). CL.

Helen Taylor
Myself When Young

'All very simple,' I recorded, 'quickly over. And afterwards Mrs Hunkin called me Mrs Browning, which sounded so strange. When we got back to the harbour everyone seemed to know what had happened, and people were waving from houses and cottages. We quickly had breakfast, then loaded stores on to Yggy, and set off for the harbour mouth and the open sea. The Quiller-Couches, in their rowing-boat, hailed us and presented a bottle of their home-brewed sloe gin. Then we were away, heading down-channel for the Helford River and Frenchman's Creek. We couldn't have chosen anything more beautiful.' Myself When Young, Ch.6, Apprenticeship, p.195, Virago (2004).

In 1977, Daphne published her intriguing and enigmatic memoir, Myself When Young, which - uncharacteristically for her - concludes rather romantically. Given her avowedly deeply sceptical approach to romance of all kinds, this closure deserves attention. It records her wedding day, 19 July 1932, and thus concludes her autobiographical account on that most conventionally promising and happy note - marriage.
But this is a marriage described at one remove: Daphne ventures no comment from her 70-year-old widow's consciousness. Instead, she quotes from her 25-year-old's diary, both the night before and the day itself. The night before she claims to be 'doing this with my eyes open', wanting 'a fuller life, greater knowledge, and understanding'. She bids adieu to 'Daphne du Maurier', and says she'll henceforward come to know 'what it was to love a man who was my husband, not a son, not a brother'. The terms of this diary entry are chillingly cerebral and philosophically engaged - though reminding us of the complex familial relations she had already enjoyed with her father and other men - but curiously lacking in emotion and passion, and very obliquely focussed on her future husband, Tommy Browning (not named in the final page).
The diary entry for the day itself describes a sense of relief - that the wedding was simple, brief and designed for a quick getaway. This passage contains the strengths of Daphne du Maurier's writing: narrative clarity, topographical precision, and an ability to select details and small incidents that create atmosphere, emotional ambivalence and complexity. Is the last line a gentle parody of romantic fiction, or a heart-felt expression of emotional release following a public ceremony of the kind she always hated? In view of the problematic and often troubled nature of her long married life, on which she must have been reflecting as she reached the limits of the autobiography she was prepared to share with the world, there is a poignancy in these optimistic diary entries without further gloss. As ever with Du Maurier's writing, the condensed narration, allusive and suggestive references, and the hint of many a story untold, speak volumes. The final words of this book still bring tears to my eyes. Helen Taylor.

Myself When Young was originally published with the title Growing Pains: The Shaping of a Writer. AW.

Jemma Hatt
My Cousin Rachel

She had so many faces, so many guises, and that name contessa, used by the servant Giuseppe and by Rainaldi too, in preference for Mrs Ashley, gave to her a kind of aura she had never had with me at first, when I had seen her as another Mrs Pascoe. Since my journey to the villa she had become a monster, larger than life itself. Her eyes were black as sloes, her features aquiline like Rainaldi's, and she moved about those musty villa rooms sinuous and silent, like a snake.
My Cousin Rachel, Ch.6, p.52/53, Virago (2003).

These lines stand out in my memory because they suggest how dangerous loneliness combined with imagination can be, as well as how carried away Philip gets when he thinks about Rachel. Although he likens Rachel to a snake, it is Philip who appears to have all of the venom! Philip's fallibility as a narrator renders Rachel's character all the more mysterious and compelling. Jemma Hatt.