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.

Ella Westland
The Scapegoat

… I lived and breathed and had my being as a law-abiding, quiet, donnish individual of thirty-eight. But to the self who clamoured for release, the man within? How did my poor record seem to him?
Who he was and whence he sprang, what urges and what longings he might possess, I could not tell. I was so used to denying him expression that his ways were unknown to me; but he might have had a mocking laugh, a casual heart, a swift-roused temper, and a ribald tongue … Perhaps, if I had not kept him locked within me, he might have laughed, roistered, fought and lied.
The Scapegoat, Ch.1, p.6/7, Virago (2004)

For me, The Scapegoat epitomises that desire to live out the life of a more primitive and passionate inner self which runs obsessively through Daphne du Maurier's fiction – from Janet Coombe's yearning for freedom in her first novel, The Loving Spirit, to Dick Young's immersion in a parallel medieval world in her late book, The House on the Strand. Donnish John in The Scapegoat seizes his chance to try on Don Juan for size, though the quiet self-questioning side of his character prevails. Ella Westland.

Ella Westland is the author of Reading Daphne, Truran (2007). CL.

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.

Lisa Appignanesi
The Scapegoat

'It's only when women have nothing to do that they get into mischief. They turn religious or take lovers.'
The Scapegoat, Ch.25, p.343, Virago (2004).

Lisa Appignanesi.

Lisa Appignanesi wrote the introduction to the Virago edition of The Scapegoat. She is President of English PEN, an organisation founded to promote literature as a means of greater understanding between cultures. CL.

Tessa Montgomery
The Scapegoat

The setting sun dipped in our wake, and as we drove east the deep country folded upon us, forested and still. The lonely farmsteads lay oasis-like and misty, isolated patches amongst the soft red glow of fields. The acres of land were remote and beautiful as a vast ocean unexplored, and the golden asparagus fern like mermaids' hair, bordering the ribbon road that wound towards the trees. Nothing was real to me, nothing had substance. Everything I saw had the quality of a dream, from the pale stubble to the reedy stems of sunflowers long since picked and left to fall upon themselves with the first autumn frost. The solidity of haystacks, streaky white, usually hard and clear-cut on the horizon, merged into the soil, becoming part of it, and long avenues of poplars, with shivering, falling leaves, came out of nowhere and disappeared again. Ghost trees, tall and slim, closed in upon the long figure of a peasant woman walking, head bowed, towards some unseen destination. A sudden impulse bade me tell the chauffeur to stop the car, and I stood for a moment, listening to silence, as the sun went down behind us dark and red, and the white mist rose.
The Scapegoat, Ch.3, p. 31/2, Virago (2004).

The love of the French countryside is something that my mother and I both shared, and this description captures it so vividly. Tessa Montgomery.

Tessa Montgomery is Daphne du Maurier's elder daughter. AW.

Jan Ravens
The Scapegoat

Perhaps, if I had not kept him locked within me, he might have laughed, roistered, fought and lied. Perhaps he suffered, perhaps he hated, perhaps he lived by cruelty alone. He might have murdered, stolen - or spent himself in lost causes, loved humanity, embraced a faith that believed in the divinity of both God and Man. Whatever his nature, he always hovered beneath the insignificant façade of that pale self who now sat in the church of Notre-Dame-de-la-Couture waiting for the rain to cease, for the day to fold, for the holiday to come to its appointed end, for autumn to set in, for the day-by-day routine of his normal, uneventful London life to close upon him for another year, another span of time. The question was, how to unlock the door?
The Scapegoat, Ch.1, p.6/7, Virago (2004).

An aspect of Daphne's own life which features hugely in her fiction is the duality in us all; the conflict between what we would like to be and what we actually are. This goes all the way back to Janet Coombe in The Loving Spirit and is developed compellingly in The Scapegoat.

In the year it was published, Daphne wrote of herself and Tommy: We are both doubles. So is everyone. Every one of us has his, or her, dark side. Which is to overcome the other? Daphne du Maurier by Margaret Forster, Ch.17, p.285, Arrow Books (2007).

In the quote that I have chosen Daphne describes John, the hero of The Scapegoat, as a quiet donnish figure; and he describes how he keeps his other self firmly suppressed. Jan Ravens.

Jan was the winner of BBC's Celebrity Mastermind on 1st January 2008. Her specialist subject was Daphne du Maurier. CL.