Why a Booktrail?
1957 and present day: Step inside Daphne du Maurier’s world via those ornate gates on the cover.
Daphne
What you need to know before your trail
1957 Cornwall – Daphne du Maurier wanders alone through her remote mansion on the Cornish coast. She is haunted by her surroundings and feels that the literary heroine of her novel Rebecca is there with her in spirit. Her marriage is failing and she is despondent and lonely.
She needs a distraction and that comes in the form of Branwell, the brother of the famous Bronte sisters and she also starts to writes letters to a scholar by the name of Alex Symington
Present day London: A lonely young woman struggles with her thesis on du Maurier and the Brontes and finds herself in the middle of a fifty-year-old literary mystery.
Locations
Reset- England - Du Maurier Country
- A: Cornwall - Menabilly
- B: Cornwall - Fowey Estuary
- C: Daphne Du Maurier Literary Centre Ltd
- D: Cornwall - Lanteglos Church
- England -Bronte Country
- E: Haworth - Brontë Parsonage Museum
- F: Haworth - Tourist Information
Travel Guide
Cornwall
Cornwall is also known as Daphne du Maurier country for the fact she lived and married there and set her books in the local area with the stunning scenery as much a character as the characters themselves. To reimagine the land and the house as Daphne herself would have seen it, is to see it through her own eyes as opposed to those of her characters. Menabilly is the famous home which was the inspiration for Manderely.
Menabilly
This is the home and literary setting of both Daphne du Maurier’s real life and her novels. Most of books are set in the area of Menabilly and along the Fowey Coast for this is where she lived and married. The house at Menabilly was the setting for her most famous novel Rebecca and of course is more famously known as Manderley. Daphne herself was in an unhappy marriage and could well have been the inspiration for the novel itself.
Haworth, Yorkshire
As well as her own novels, she wrote The Infernal World of Branwell Brontë as she wanted to know who Branwell, the lesser known of the famous sisters was like and what his literary legacy might be.
Daphne corresponded with Symington, the disgraced former custodian of the Brontë library at Haworth. He was the custodian however of a very dark world and the two literary worlds of de Maurier and the Brontes is a great literary mix of two of the most iconic and captivating worlds in English literature.
Where Next?
