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.

Charles Richard Brown
Mary Anne

She went and sat on the steps of St Martin's Church, hemmed in by grumbling men and weary women, crying children pressing against her knees, all of them huddled together for greater warmth, defeating the gusts of wind and the slanting rain.
A woman beside her offered her bread-and-cheese, and a man on the other side a swig of beer. 'Here's luck all round,' she said, and somebody laughed, and the sun came out and one of them started singing. She thought of her vestal virgins in Boulogne and George in his regimentals, stiff and pompous, and suddenly none of them mattered, not even George; she was home where she belonged, in the heart of London.
Mary Anne, Part 4, Ch.6, p.384/5, Virago (2003).

I echo the sentiments of Caroline Metcalfe as I, too, love the end of Mary Anne. But I think that the few previous sentences are just as apposite and enhance Caroline Metcalfe's choice. Mary Anne is my favourite Daphne du Maurier book - though I haven't read many - as it is based upon Regency times and London - two of my pet interests. The story is one of rags to riches to disgrace; and Mary is based upon the great-great grandmother of Daphne du Maurier.
Charles Richard Brown.

Caroline Metcalfe
Mary Anne

'Come far?' asked her next-door neighbour, sucking an orange.
'Only from round the corner,' she said, 'from Bowling Inn Alley,'
The bells of St Martin's began to toll but she went on sitting there, eating her bread-and-cheese, tossing the rind to the pigeons that spattered the steps, and watching a million starlings span the sky.
Mary Anne, Part 4, Ch.6, p.385, Virago (2004).

I love the end of Mary Anne when she has been the mistress of a prince and is reduced again to poverty and someone asks her if she has come far. Caroline Metcalfe.

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.