Venetian tendencies

In November 1947, Daphne du Maurier fell in love with a woman. It wasn't the first time, nor would it be the last. But it was to be the most surprising to du Maurier herself. The affair she had already had, with a teacher at her finishing school in Paris, was 20 years behind her, and she considered herself more or less what she seemed to be to the outside world: a successful writer, a mother, and, an affair or two notwithstanding, a wife. Her nemesis was Ellen Doubleday, the wife of du Maurier's US publisher, Nelson Doubleday, and the way in which they met, according to Margaret Forster's excellent 1993 biography, Daphne, only added to the shock.

Du Maurier had been sued over alleged plagiarism in her 1938 novel Rebecca, and had to travel to the US to answer those charges in court. She went by sea, on the Queen Mary. Two days into the journey, Doubleday knocked on her cabin door. Du Maurier "stared at her speechless, then sank down on her bunk", Forster writes. "In a letter she wrote to Ellen six weeks later, when she was back in England, she described how overcome she had been and how she had instantly been transported back 20 years in time until she was 'a boy of 18 all over again with nervous hands and a beating heart, incurably romantic and wanting to throw a cloak before his lady's feet...'. Her feelings of excitement were mixed with ones close to terror."

We can thank Ellen Doubleday for two things. Firstly, she lived abroad. Secondly, she wasn't gay, and though she became very fond of du Maurier, she made it clear that she was not going to sleep with her. Those two things resulted in an outpouring of frustrated, intense letters from du Maurier to Doubleday that tell us a great deal about her conflicted feelings about the attraction she felt for women. Read what she has to say in the letters, and then reread her novels, and they take on a whole new meaning. In Rebecca, in particular, phrases and images du Maurier used to Doubleday leap out at you, even though the novel was written nearly a decade earlier.

The idea that she was really a boy, not a woman, is one that du Maurier returns to over and over again. She had grown up, she writes to Doubleday, "with a boy's mind and a boy's heart... so that at 18, this half-breed fell in love, as a boy would, with someone quite 12 years older than himself... and he loved her in every conceivable way. And then the boy realised he had to grow up, and not be a boy any longer, so he turned into a girl, and the boy was locked in the box forever. D du M wrote her books, and had young men, and later a husband, and children, and a lover, but... she opened up the box sometimes and let the phantom, who was neither boy nor girl but disembodied spirit, dance in the evening when there was no one to see."

The boy's abrupt reappearance threw her into turmoil, she writes: "I pushed the boy back into his box again and avoided you on the boat like the plague... You looked lovelier every day. It just defeated me." But however much in love du Maurier was, Doubleday was not under any circumstances to think she was a lesbian. "By God and by Christ, if anyone should call that love by that unattractive word that begins with 'L', I'd tear their guts out."

Ironically, du Maurier was something of a homophobe. "Nobody could be more bored with all the L people than I am," she writes. "I like to think my Jack-in-the-box was, and is, unique." But this "uniqueness" brought with it anguished self-doubt: "Disembodied spirits like myself are all wrong," she wails to Doubleday at one point, and "my life has been one long lie for as far back as I can remember" at another. She wears many masks, she writes, but is in the end "merely the person dancing alone in the long room, thumbing my nose at the world". Not even Doubleday was exempt from mockery: after visiting her in the US, du Maurier writes, cruelly: "I am shaking with silent laughter most of the time, but you are probably not aware of it."

Du Maurier's love affairs with women are common knowledge now. But they weren't during du Maurier's lifetime. It was only after she died in 1989 that Forster's biography made her sexuality public. Forster writes, in a new, revised edition released as part of the centenary of du Maurier's birth, 100 years ago today, that du Maurier's children still find their mother's bisexuality hard to accept. Perhaps the fact that du Maurier kept it hidden for so long, however, is not surprising, since she was a secretive woman who struggled to understand it herself. She describes sexual feelings evasively, using code words and euphemisms, "the L word" being but one example. An attractive person she termed "a menace" (note the suggestion of threat); foreplay was "spinning", to have sex was "to wax", sex with men was "Cairo", sex with women "Venice". She wouldn't name things by their name. In one of her later letters to Doubleday, though, she admits that she preferred "Venice" to "Cairo", because she felt more confident with it. "Truly, truly, I should have been born a boy. Don't you think? ... Nothing is more amusing than to have fun with glamorous or menacing men, but that's a diversion, it's not home ... What is strongest in you comes out in the middle years. [I have] gone back to nature."