An evening with Paul de Zulueta: inside the du Maurier family
How the book began
When Aimée, who hosted our Autumn Book Club season, asked Paul what set him on the path to Last Night I Dreamt, the answer was Covid. With time on his hands, he wrote two books of military history. His agent then suggested something less niche: his grandmother and her family.
So Paul turned to his mother, aunt and uncle, now 94, 90 and 87, who hold the family's private letters and, as he put it, all the secrets. He pointed out what sets his book apart. No previous biographer of Daphne had ever met her.
The family had always had one complaint about those earlier books: they missed how funny she was. Paul set out to put the laughter back, and over the course of the evening he did exactly that.
A royal mistress, a cartoonist and Captain Hook
Paul's agent gave him one piece of advice: to understand Daphne, you have to understand her ancestors. So he began our evening where the book begins, with her great-great-grandmother, Mary Anne Clarke.
As mistress to the Grand Old Duke of York, Mary Anne sold army commissions on his behalf. When the scandal reached a parliamentary inquiry in 1809, she faced more than 600 MPs and, in Paul's words, got the better of them. The government paid her £10,000 and an annuity to keep the Duke's letters quiet, and Daphne admired her so much that she kept satirical prints of her in her bathroom at Menabilly.
From there, Paul walked us down the family line. Mary Anne's grandson George came to London from France with very little English. A detached retina ended his hopes as a painter, so he drew for Punch instead, and gave us the "curate's egg". His novel Trilby, with its sinister Svengali, was one of the great bestsellers of the 19th century.
George's son Gerald was the leading actor-manager of the Edwardian stage, the first actor to put his hands in his pockets on stage and the first Captain Hook. He was also, Paul admitted, a terrible womaniser. One of the most entertaining stories of the evening concerned the family parrot at Cannon Hall in Hampstead. It learned the numbers Gerald gave the operator when he rang his mistresses from the kitchen, then recited them to his wife.
Gerald also fed his daughter's darker imagination. While rehearsing a play about murder, he took Daphne and her sister to Pentonville Prison, where the governor showed them the gallows and Dr Crippen's grave. Paul confessed he began the book thinking the worst of Gerald, and finished it firmly on his side.
The real Manderley
In 1926 Gerald bought Ferryside, on the river at Fowey, and Daphne went there at nineteen. Paul told us it gave her everything she had longed for: the freedom to write, to walk and to be alone. Fifteen of her novels are set in Cornwall, and his uncle Kits still lives at Ferryside a century later.
For a Book Club fresh from Rebecca, the highlight was Manderley itself. Its exterior is Menabilly, the Rashleigh family's house near Fowey, which Daphne leased for 26 years. Its interiors, Paul explained, come from Milton Hall near Peterborough, home of the Fitzwilliam family, which Daphne first visited aged ten. Decades later she wrote to Earl Fitzwilliam describing the house from memory.
When Paul visited Milton Hall himself, the present owner handed him a photograph of a former housekeeper, Mrs Parker, remembered as "a horrible old thing" who wore black and carried a great set of keys. Here, Paul is sure, was Mrs Danvers. And when Aimée asked about the portrait the second Mrs de Winter copies for the fancy dress ball, he traced that back to Milton Hall too.
He also offered a fresh theory on where Rebecca began. Rather than Daphne's jealousy of Boy Browning's former fiancée, Paul points to a story Sir Richard Rashleigh told him, of an ancestor's second wife who refused to live at Menabilly, haunted by the memory of the first.
Daphne at home
What made the evening so special was how personally Paul spoke about his grandmother. At home she was Lady Browning, and she never talked about her books, not even over Sunday lunch. He remembers her as warm and very funny, until she went down to her writing hut and became someone else entirely.
She described it herself in a letter to Paul's aunt Flavia, which he shared with us: a shy "number one self" and a darker "number two self" that did much of the writing, rather like twins who must be kept in balance. The family also had a private code, still in use today. To be attracted to someone was to be "menaced", and Daphne once declared herself badly menaced by the Chief Constable of Cornwall. A dull story was "a tell him".
Paul spoke movingly about his grandfather, Lieutenant-General Sir Frederick "Boy" Browning, who won the DSO at twenty and commanded the airborne corps at Arnhem. Paul believes he carried the trauma of both wars for the rest of his life. He read us a letter from 1946, written when Boy came home from Ceylon. Daphne had new clothes made and went up to London full of excitement, and was greeted with a peck on the cheek.
That generation, Paul said, never learned how to talk to each other, but the letter shows how deeply she loved him. He shared one memory of his own, too. At Easter 1968, during a difficult time for the family, she took him on the only walk they ever took alone together, up to Gribbin Head above Menabilly, talking about The King's General and a new novel she was planning.
What endures
Henry James once said that, at observing others, the du Mauriers had no equal, and Paul sees that gift in every generation. Rebecca, he told us, still sells around 4,000 copies a month. Daphne summed up her own aim in four words: "I like to disturb."
For our next Book Club read, Paul recommended the novel she described to him on that Easter walk. The House on the Strand travels back to 14th-century Cornwall, and we can think of no better way to follow the evening. Our thanks to Paul for joining us.
Last Night I Dreamt: A Personal History of the du Mauriers by Paul de Zulueta is published by Virago.
