The Short Stories of Daphne du Maurier

The first in a new series celebrating the short story genre

Photo of Lizard Point, Cornwall by Dan Booth on Pexels

Welcome to this additional mid-week edition of A Narrative of their Own.  This is an extra newsletter for paying subscribers, and I want to welcome and say thank you to new subscribers for supporting my work!

This week, I’m kicking off a series on the short story genre, where I plan to explore the short story collections of some of 20^th century’s most prolific female writers. 

First up, and following on from my recent discussion on Rebecca, are the short stories of Daphne du Maurier.  Recognised more as a successful novelist, du Maurier also wrote an impressive amount of short fiction, many of which are novella length, and much of it written whilst she was still in her late teens and early twenties. 

I hope you enjoy this first edition, and would love to throw out an opportunity for you to make suggestions for any female short story writers of the 20^th century you would like me to research.  Leave any suggestions in the comments!

Now, on to du Maurier and her dark and brooding short fiction…

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Following on from last week’s post on Rebecca, I thought it would be interesting to look at the short stories of Daphne du Maurier.  I think much of the spotlight of the writer’s work has fallen to her well-known novels, which include Jamaica Inn, My Cousin Rachel, and Frenchman’s Creek, amongst many others.

But she also wrote many short stories.  In 2011, Virago Press published her whole collection under the name The Doll: Short Stories, and it was interesting to investigate these and see if they lived up to the gothic, psychological tendencies of novels such as Rebecca.  Many of the stories were written in her early years as a writer at the start of her twenties - the title story of the collection was written when du Maurier was just nineteen years old - and it seems that the themes that would preoccupy her later novels were already at the forefront of her mind.

Many of these stories are surprisingly disturbing, featuring not so much the gothic genre, but hints at a dark side to sexuality, incest, and complex father/daughter relationships.  As I mentioned in my Rebecca discussion last week, du Maurier often struggled with her own sexual feelings towards both men and women, and perhaps this confusion, as well as the relationship the du Maurier daughters had with their father, shaped her early work.

Following an anxious childhood spent mostly at the family home in Hampstead, du Maurier finally fled to Fowey to write at the age of twenty-two.  She had long expressed her desire to stay on the coast of Cornwall after the summers she spent there, but her domineering and often obsessive father insisted she return to the family home in London. 

It is interesting, then, that the title story is a tale of obsession.  It features a young woman in love with a mechanical doll with the name Julio, and the male narrator of the story is obsessed with this young woman, yet cannot understand what her relationship with the doll is.  The name ‘Julio’ is reminiscent of du Maurier’s novel Julius, the name of the father in her infamous novel who holds an incestuous and murderous desire for his own daughter.  The novel was published just five years after ‘The Doll’ short story was written.

The male narrator refers to the doll’s ‘red wet lips’, an eerie echo mirrored in du Maurier’s memoir, Myself When Young, whereby she refers to stolen kisses with her cousin Geoffrey, twenty-two years older than her and already married twice.  Perhaps what is even more disturbing was her claim that: ‘The strange thing is it’s so like kissing D[addy]’.

It has been reported in various biographies that du Maurier’s father Gerald held an obsessive love for his daughter, often resulting in drunken rages where he laid accusations onto her, causing her much anxiety.  This was aided further by her mother Muriel’s compliance over her husband’s many affairs, and her general ambivalence to the young Daphne.  In Myself When Young, du Maurier stated that ‘The child destined to be a writer is vulnerable to every wind that blows’, and her stormy upbringing between these two parents can clearly be seen to have had an effect on these early stories, as well as laying the foundations for her later novels.

Within ‘The Doll’, something as simple as a plaything is exposed as being vulgar and shameful, perhaps an echo of du Maurier’s own sensibility at discovering sexual pleasure and her disquiet at her attraction to women.  This shameful expression of female sexuality is repeated in such novels as I’ll Never be Young Again, and more famously in the portrayal of Maxim De Winter’s first wife in Rebecca. 

The collection as a whole has stories containing elements of her later novels, such as fanatical love for an unattainable woman and sexual shame.