Daphne du Maurier: Haunted by an Absent Woman
Daphne du Maurier (1907-1989) was one of the bestselling novelists of the 20th Century. Rebecca, Jamaica Inn, My Cousin Rachel, and The Birds have made her a household name, and Alfred Hitchcock adapted three of her works to film. She was awarded a Damehood in 1969 for services to literature. She lived most of her adult life in Cornwall, writing stories of obsession, jealousy, and concealment.
Du Maurier described herself as a ‘half-breed’, one who was female on the outside but possessed a male energy ‘with a boy’s mind and a boy’s heart’. Du Maurier’s childhood saw her dress in men’s clothing and taking on an alter ego of Eric Avon, a cricket captain at Rugby. She didn’t believe she was a lesbian and struggled with her ‘Venetian tendencies’: a coded phrase Du Maurier would use to describe her attraction to females and her same-sex relationships, as opposed to ‘Cairo’, her heterosexual attraction. But her letters, published after her death, leave no doubt about the depth and nature of Du Maurier’s feelings for women.
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The Women She Loved
Du Maurier had several romantic attachments to women, which she called ‘obsessions’ in private correspondence. The first was to her French governess, Fernande Yvon, when she was 18. The intensity of the feeling took Du Maurier by surprise, and set the pattern of extreme feeling for the rest of her life. She later fell passionately in love with Ellen Doubleday, the wife of her American publisher, writing her letters of aching devotion. Ellen did not reciprocate these intense same-sex feelings, and the one-sided passion was devastating for du Maurier.
Around 1948, Du Maurier would go on to have an affair with the actress Gertrude Lawrence, the leading star in Du Maurier’s play September Tide. Du Maurier had specifically written the play for Lawrence. Lawrence was a glamorous, confident woman, and Du Maurier was infatuated; their relationship became intensely emotional and physical. The affair continued until Lawrence’s sudden death in 1952, after fainting backstage after a Saturday matinee of The King and I and being rushed to hospital. Du Maurier’s grief was private but profound, even writing Lawrence’s final spoken words to her (‘Go from me, and don’t look back, like a person walking in their sleep’) into a farewell in her short story ‘Kiss Me Again, Stranger’.
Kissing your hands is like writing a poem.
~ Private letter to Ellen Doubleday, Daphne du Maurier
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Rebecca and the Queer Gothic
Du Maurier published Rebecca in 1938. On its surface, the novel is a gothic romance: a young woman marriers a wealthy widower, moves into his vast estate, but is haunted by the memory of his first wife. The unnamed narrator succumbs to an obsession with Rebecca: her beauty, confidence, and command of every room even beyond the grave. This intensity goes beyond jealousy. And the narrator isn’t the only one to indulge in her obsession with the first Mrs de Winter.
Mrs Danvers, the housekeeper, is the novel’s most recognisably queer character. Her worship of Rebecca is physical, obsessive, and explicitly sensual. She goes to great lengths to preserve Rebecca’s bedroom as a shrine, well beyond a dutiful servant. She handles the dead Rebecca’s underwear with a delicate intimacy as if they were sacred relics. The novel never names Mrs Danvers’ intense feelings. But the queer subtext is unmistakeable.
Mrs Danvers worships Rebecca with a devotion that is unmistakably erotic. She handles and caresses Rebecca’s clothes with great intimacy, inhales her scent, and speaks of her dead mistress in the language of a lover.
Read through a queer lens, Rebecca is more than just a gothic romance. It is a novel about desire between women, coded in the only form the 1930s would permit: obsession, jealousy, and destruction. Du Maurier, who understood her own desires for women but refused to name them publicly, wrote a remarkable novel in which that queer desire permeates and possesses every room of a great house and the women who live there.
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The Essential Reading
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Why This Matters Today
Du Maurier’s queerness shaped her writing, and in Rebecca we can see queer desire coded throughout the structures of gothic fiction. For readers who have questioned Mrs Danvers obsession and sensed something unspoken that the plot doesn’t quite account for, this context explains everything. Du Maurier spent a lifetime refusing to name what her private letters and thinking clearly say. Rebecca, a story about the hypnotic obsession with an absent woman, says everything it needs to about Du Maurier’s own unspoken queer obsessions.
