[LIVRES DE NOS MAISONS] Daphne du Maurier, novelist of transmission

In the libraries of our family houses dragging abandoned books. Similarly, Their authors were famous, perhaps … However, their glory passed. Nevertheless, This summer, BV invites you to discover some of these writers or these books.

Daphné du Maurier is not strictly speaking “forgotten” but we only keep it only the image that best appeals. Moreover, to our society. Meanwhile, In a biography published in 2015, Manderley for everTatiana de Rosnay does not fail to evoke his potential bisexuality. However, Rebeccamain character in her eponymous novel. However, is erected by some in LGBT heroine, and we only remember her works adapted to cinema as My cousin Rachel, Rebecca or Birds. Additionally, However. However, those who read most of his works know that the British author, born in 1907 and died in 1989, married to an officer and mother of three, cannot be reduced [livres de nos maisons] daphne to this image that satisfies our contemporaries.

Reading Daphné du Maurier is crossing the threshold of an old house …

Where each piece of furniture, each odor, each object has been chosen, felt, touched by other hands before us. Therefore, There is in all the novels of Daphné du Maurier a house which still hears the voice of the absent. In addition, a landscape which carries the memory of the generations, a face which recalls others which preceded it. We know the author for his dark intrigue as Rebecca. Birds or The Jamaica inn But what transpires in its stories is transmission, as an invisible force that crosses time and shapes destinies.
His first novel. published in France in 1950, which met with some success, set the tone from the beginning as summarized by his initial title: The love chain. Renamed Love in the soulthe story describes the link between four [livres de nos maisons] daphne generations that spread over a century in a. port on the Coast of Cornwall. The sea becomes a character, a good that is transmitted and flows into the blood of the successive protagonists. Janet Coombe. the heroine and the mother of the beginning of the story feels this link: ” Something beyond herself, a spirit or a will, had been transmitted to him by those who had preceded it, binding it to the sea and the ships ». Just like in The Jamaica inn Besides. where the Lande de Cornwall is not just a decor but a character who imposes his laws on those who occupy it and transmit it.

The individual is no exception to the past of his ancestors

The inheritance is not only material. it is a momentum, a vocation, a part of identity received and carried: ” The same blood that had flowed into their veins [livres de nos maisons] daphne now flowed into its own, and it seemed that with him came their desire, their courage and their impatient hearts ». Daphne du Maurier takes up the history of his French ancestors in the revolutionary era in Glass blowers. She evokes the link between a mother. her daughter: ” The sons, even if they lived under the same roof, had their own concerns … But a girl … was still part of the mother, […] The pains of the girl were those that the mother had herself known. ” In The scapegoatJohn. a lonely Englishman, is trapped by Jean de Gué and forced to take his place and with her his family, his rank, and his duties: another way of seeing the line, the individual as the fruit of the renewal of generations, as a link in a chain of transmission that Zola would not deny. As with the French [livres de nos maisons] daphne naturalist. the individual does not escape the past of his ancestors, but today, this way of thinking about man as the product of a past, like the link in a chain, like the heir to previous generations is not in fashion: from the past, you have to make a clean table, man should only live for him and by him.

Coming from a family of artists. comedians, Daphné du Maurier grew up in an atmosphere where heritage is not just a word, he lives and he is transmitted: he is everywhere in his works. Blood. memory, passions, wounds, attachments, obsessions, worries, beyond fluffed mansions and tormented heroines, the British writer weaves a fresco throughout his work: that of family ties. Daphnée could have like Janet. one of the links of The love chain Who ” felt the weight of their past behind her, not as a burden but as a [livres de nos maisons] daphne hand supporting her steps “, Summarize it as” family obliges “.

The works of Daphné du Maurier have all been edited in Pocket book And they are found quite easily. on the internet.