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.

Marion Gibson
The Birds and Other Stories

At the top of the hill he waited. He was much too soon. There was half an hour still to go. The east wind came whipping across the fields from the higher ground. He stamped his feet and blew upon his hands. In the distance he could see the clay hills, white and clean, against the heavy pallor of the sky. Something black rose from behind them, like a smudge at first, then widening, becoming deeper, and the smudge became a cloud, and the cloud divided again into five other clouds, spreading north, east, south and west, and they were not clouds at all; they were birds.
The Birds and Other Stories, The Birds, p.16, Virago (2004).

This is one of my favourite moments from Daphne du Maurier's writing-it was either this or the whole of Rebecca (!). I particularly love the long last sentence, spreading out like the flocks of birds from the simple, undefined and chilling 'something' at the start. The ominous contrast of the black clouds with the white clay hills is a classic horror device, and I like its absolutely specific Cornish reference too. I drive past the clay hills everyday to work at the university campus at Penryn, where I teach on the English degree programmes, and that this great horror story should be set so close to home is thrilling. The weirdness of the 'Cornish Alps', conical and mounded clay hills as high as the moors, resonates further if you know what they look like, so that du Maurier's homely-yet-terrifying birds are flying over a kind of earthly moonscape to find and attack the people in the tale. This is a cracking short story, and it is easy to see why Hitchcock chose to film it. Read and shudder.
Dr. Marion Gibson.

Josephine King
The Birds

The wind seemed to cut him to the bone as he stood there, uncertainly, holding the sack. He could see the white-capped seas breaking down under in the bay. He decided to take the birds to the shore and bury them…
He crunched his way over the shingle to the softer sand and then, his back to the wind, ground a pit in the sand with his heel. He meant to drop the birds into it, but as he opened up the sack the force of the wind carried them, lifted them, as though in flight again, and they were blown away from him along the beach, tossed like feathers, spread and scattered, the bodies of the fifty frozen birds…The dead birds were swept away from him by the wind...He looked out to sea and watched the crested breakers, combing green…
Then he saw them. The gulls. Out there, riding the seas.
What he had thought at first to be the white caps of the waves were gulls. Hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands… They rose and fell in the trough of the seas, heads to the wind, like a mighty fleet at anchor, waiting on the tide. To eastward and to the west, the gulls were there. They stretched as far as his eye could reach, in close formation, line upon line. Had the sea been still they would have covered the bay like a white cloud, head to head, body packed to body.
The Birds and Other Stories, Ch.1, p.10/11, Virago (2004).

The menace in this passage is palpable and never ceases to scare me to death: 'Then he saw them. The gulls. Out there, riding the seas.' The shock is punched home by the staccato phrasing. Superb. Josephine King.

The Birds and Other Stories was originally published with the title The Apple Tree. AW.

Josephine is a Blue Badge Guide for the du Maurier festival walks. AW.