‘We can never go back again,’ wrote Daphne du Maurier in her bestselling novel Rebecca (1938). ‘The past is still too close to us.’ Yet back she went, in book after book, to the past of her remarkable family. In 1934, six months after the death of her father, the matinée idol Gerald du Maurier, Daphne wrote his biography, portraying him as a spoilt man-baby with a ‘stable’ of mistresses. Gerald’s own father, George du Maurier, was the celebrated book illustrator and Punch cartoonist whose creation of characters such as Mrs Ponsonby de Tomkyns and Lady Gatheremall skewered the Victorian nouveaux riches. A friend of Henry James, he also wrote Trilby, the bestselling novel of the 1890s, in which Svengali, the demonic manipulator, transforms a tone-deaf young laundress into a world-class diva.
It was George, said Daphne, who ‘started it all, the family’s creative and dark imagination’, but the spirit can be seen in his grandmother, Mary Anne Clarke, Regency courtesan to the Duke of York, who ran a lucrative side hustle selling commissions to the army. Mary Anne, wrote Daphne in her family biography, was
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