Daphné du Maurier: novelist who retraced the past in a French prison for debts

Image source, UNITED PRESS PHOTO/AFP
Dame Daphne du Maurier, an English novelist who died in 1989, was fascinated by her French heritage.
The author of Rebecca and Jamaica Inn had been raised by the tales of an aristocratic ancestor who came to London during the French Revolution, fleeing the guillotine and militants sans -culottes.
But when she started looking into her family history, she discovered that everything was a little more complicated. Far from being nobles, his French ancestors were in fact bourgeois craftsmen whose trade was glassmaking. a prison for debts.
It is now possible to retrace the steps of Daphné du Maurier, while she was conducting her research in France in the 1950s Traveling through the Perche region, 190 km southwest of Paris, she visited the farms, castles and glass foundries that figured in her family history.
Image source, Anne Hall: In the footsteps of Daphne Du Maurier
They became the setting for her 1963 historical novel Les Souffleurs de verre, in which she recounted her great-great-grandfather Robert Busson, his humble roots as a manufacturer of perfume bottles in the forests near Le Mans, and how he came to spawn an artistic dynasty of Englishmen du Mauriers in London.

Entertainment Jul 3, 2022 0 91 Add to Reading List

Daphné du Maurier: novelist who retraced the past in a French prison for debts

Image source, UNITED PRESS PHOTO/AFP

Dame Daphne du Maurier, an English novelist who died in 1989, was fascinated by her French heritage.

The author of Rebecca and Jamaica Inn had been raised by the tales of an aristocratic ancestor who came to London during the French Revolution, fleeing the guillotine and militants sans -culottes.

But when she started looking into her family history, she discovered that everything was a little more complicated. Far from being nobles, his French ancestors were in fact bourgeois craftsmen whose trade was glassmaking. a prison for debts.

It is now possible to retrace the steps of Daphné du Maurier, while she was conducting her research in France in the 1950s Traveling through the Perche region, 190 km southwest of Paris, she visited the farms, castles and glass foundries that figured in her family history.

Image source, Anne Hall: In the footsteps of Daphne Du Maurier

They became the setting for her 1963 historical novel Les Souffleurs de verre, in which she recounted her great-great-grandfather Robert Busson, his humble roots as a manufacturer of perfume bottles in the forests near Le Mans, and how he came to spawn an artistic dynasty of Englishmen du Mauriers in London.