Influential as Mlle Yvon might have been, Occam’s razor would suggest Rebecca was more likely inspired by Jeannette “Jan” Ricardo, the raven-haired ex-fiancée of army officer Frederick Browning-whom du Maurier married in 1932. By the school year’s end, Mlle Yvon was quietly fired and long gone clearly, though, du Maurier’s memory of her did not fade. By August, Forster deduces, they were lovers-“in every conceivable way,” du Maurier would later write to her friend Ellen Doubleday. That summer Yvon invited her young student with her on a weeks-long spa getaway in the South of France. “She loved Ferdy, and was loved by her,” wrote Forster. At 18 she began obsessively writing in her diary about Mlle Yvon, her dark-haired, green-eyed, 30-year-old, unmarried headmistress. Like Eric Avon might have, young Daphne crushed often and intensely. “What her family did not realize, and this was much more serious, was that Daphne was convinced she was a boy,” writes Forster. She chopped her hair short, played cricket and rugby, and dressed in male clothing. Daphne embodied her masculine alter ego so often that she gave him a name-Eric Avon-and by the age of 10, Daphne had decided that she preferred life as Eric. When the siblings performed plays, she writes, Daphne always played the male lead.

Margaret Forster’s 1993 du Maurier biography dives into their childhood. “This literary miscarriage has cast me down.” “The first 15,000 words I tore up in disgust,” she confessed in a letter to her publisher. Du Maurier suffered from writer’s block, low moods, and frustration. But though she had ample time to write, the story didn’t come as easily as the money had. Rebecca was the first work du Maurier published after nabbing a three-book deal with a fat £1,000 advance (about $88,000 U.S. In Daphne du Maurier: A Daughter’s Memoir, her daughter Flavia Leng described the du Maurier home as a writers utopia: “The house was always filled with well-known folk from the world of theatre and literature.” Peter Pan author J.M. Daphne’s grandfather George du Maurier’s gothic novel Trilby introduced the now-legendary character “Svengali” to the canon her father, Gerald, was a stage actor so famous that du Maurier cigarettes are named after him. The du Mauriers were a famous and wealthy family of actors and writers. Du Maurier’s fifth novel made her a literary sensation at 31, although not one without a head start. Published in 1938, Rebecca was an overnight success-the initial print run of 20,000 flew off bookstore shelves. This version-premiering 80 years after Alfred Hitchcock’s timeless best-picture winner-casts Armie Hammer and Lily James as rich widower Maxim de Winter and his nameless bride, who’s slowly consumed with envy as she grows obsessed with his first wife, Rebecca. On October 21, Netflix premieres a film reincarnation of an old classic: Rebecca, based on the novel by Daphne du Maurier.

Rebecca du maurier