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.

Sheila Hodges
The Rebecca Notebook & Other Memories

It may be thought, by churchgoing readers, that during the course of this peaceful Sunday I continue to neglect my Maker. On the contrary, conversing with beast and bird is my way of giving thanks. And if anything deepens belief in a Creator, it is by watching wildlife in the countryside, a constant miracle, and noting the changes in their routine through the four seasons: something that applies equally to the colour and growth of trees, plants and shrubs, even weeds. They all obey natural law, which is surely God's law.
The Rebecca Notebook, Sunday (1976), p.170, Virago (2004),

Sheila edited Daphne's work whilst working at Victor Gollancz from 1943-1981.

In her biography of Daphne, A Portrait of Daphne du Maurier, Ch.25, Out of Eden, p.265/6, Bantam Press (1991), Judith Cook recalls Daphne writing about Kilmarth, 'The grounds abounded with wildlife - badgers and foxes, owls, jackdaws, swallows and martins and a host of butterflies.'
Noël Welch, Jeanne du Maurier's companion for many years, wrote an article in 1973 entitled 'The Du Mauriers' for The Cornish Review (No.24), comparing the three du Maurier sisters. 'Like their father they all love bird watching,' Noel recalls. In fact Gerald was a keen ornithologist, a passion clearly passed on to Daphne. In Frenchman's Creek alone there are over 90 references to birds, including fifteen different species. QED. CL.

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.

Billie Graeme
The Rebecca Notebook & Other Memories

Another World (1947)

All of this poem especially the end:

… But if I must
Go wandering in Time and seek the source
Of my life force,
Lend me your sable wings, that as I fall
Beyond recall,
The sober stars may tumble in my wake,
For Jesus'sake.
The Rebecca Notebook & Other Memories, Poems, p.179, Virago (2004).

Billie Graeme.

Christopher Clayton
The Rebecca Notebook & Other Memories

Yet I had seen his empty shell. I had seen the light flicker and go out. Where had it gone? Was it blown to emptiness after all, like the light of a candle, and 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. Not with fear and dismay, but with courage. To have lived at all is a measure of immortality; for a baby to be born, to become a man, a woman, to beget others like himself, is an act of faith in itself, even an act of defiance. 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 & Other Memories, Death and Widowhood, p.127, Virago (2004).

Death featured strongly in Daphne's life and writing. The lines are about the death of her husband Major General Browning (responsible for Operation Market Garden, portrayed in the film A Bridge Too Far.) They call forth the hope expressed in Death and Widowhood that he had found the 'peace which passes all understanding' in which he believed. However, Daphne doubted that we have a life after death; she explained in detail her scepticism regarding religion, god and an afterlife in her essay This I Believe, also to be found in The Rebecca Notebook & Other Memories. Even so, if in the end we all 'vanish', for a brief moment we burn like a star which shines in the darkness. At the end of her family biography The du Mauriers, in which she also questions human immortality, she finds it consoling to imagine that 'we leave something of ourselves, like the wake of a vessel, as a reminder that once we passed this way.' Her thoughts on the death of her husband surely have profound meaning for those of us who do and for those of us who do not believe in an afterlife. Christopher Clayton.

Margery Instrell
The Rebecca Notebook & Other Memories

…
Mine is the silence
And the quiet gloom
Of a clock ticking
In an empty room,
The scratch of a pen,
Ink-pot and paper,
And the patter of the rain.
Nothing but this as long as I am able,
Firelight - and a chair, and a table.
…
Not for me the shadow of a smile,
Nor the life that has gone,
Nor the love that has fled,
But the thread of the spider who spins on the wall,
Who is lost, who is dead, who is nothing at all.
The Rebecca Notebook & Other Memories, Poems, The Writer (1926), p.175/7, Virago
(2004).

Daphne's poem anticipates an uncertain future as a writer, a life like the spider's thread, lacking secure ties. The imagery of her final stanza just makes me stop and reflect on life, its meaning for me and undoubted fragility. The poem was written before Daphne's first novel and perhaps an irony that it should be published in the final book by one of the most successful 20Ce authors. Margery Instrell.

Linda Cooke
The Rebecca Notebook & Other Memories

When I think of Gerald… he has pottered downstairs to the drawing room one fine morning in search of cigarettes, while Mo is upstairs having a bath, and he is wearing silk pyjamas from Beale & Inman of Bond Street, topped by a very old cardigan full of holes that once belonged to his mother. He switches on the gramophone, and the hit song of the day, a sensuous waltz, floats upon the air. He holds out his arms to a non-existent partner and, closing his eyes, circles the room with the exaggerated rhythm of a musical-comedy hero, languid, romantic, murmuring with mock passion:

'I wonder why you keep me waiting,
Charmaine, my Charmaine ….'

Unseen by friends or fans, and unobserved, so he imagines, by any member of his family, Gerald obeys the instinct of a lifetime, and is acting to himself.
The Rebecca Notebook, The Matinee Idol, p.87, Virago (2004).

Linda Cooke was the winner of the first Daily Telegraph Daphne du Maurier Competition in 1998. AW.

Alice Holt
The Rebecca Notebook & Other Memories

From the end of the lawn where I first saw her, that May morning, I stand and look upon her face. The ivy is stripped. Smoke curls from the chimneys. The windows are flung wide. The doors are open. My children come running from the house on to the lawn. The hydrangeas bloom for me. Clumps of them stand on my piano.
Slowly, in a dream, I walk towards the house. 'It's wrong,' I think, 'to love a block of stone like this, as one loves a person. It cannot last. It cannot endure. Perhaps it is the very insecurity of the love that makes the passion strong. Because she is not mine by right. The house is still entailed, and one day will belong to another…'
I brush the thought aside. For this day, and for this night, she is mine.
And at midnight, when the children sleep, and all is hushed and still, I sit down at the piano and look at the panelled walls, and slowly, softly, with no one there to see, the house whispers her secrets, and the secrets turn to stories, and in strange and eerie fashion we are at one, the house and I.
The Rebecca Notebook & Other Memories, The House of Secrets, p.144, Virago (2004).

I've always admired and shared Daphne du Maurier's love for houses and places. I so remember our family home in Suffolk and even now before I fall asleep at night, my thoughts often return to childhood. I float from room to room and all is as it was, my father's old tweed jacket hangs on his desk chair, his rack of polished pipes still line the mantelpiece, the brown bottle of Haig whisky stands on the sideboard. I can smell the scent from my mother's freshly picked Sweet Peas. All is as it should be, safe and secure, childhood memories from simpler times. Alice Holt.