Rebecca [antikvár]

Daughter of the famous actor-manager Sir Gerald du Maurier, Daphne du Maurier was educated at home in London, and then in Paris, before writing her first növel, The Loving Spirit, in 1931. Three others, and a frank biography of her father, followed before Rebecca, in 1938, made her to her surprise one of the most popular authors of the day. Nearly all her fifteen novels have been bestsellers, and several of her works became successful films, notably Rebecca, starting Laurence Olivier, and the short stories The Birds and Don 't Look Now. She alsó wrote biographies of Branwell Bronté and her own Victorian family, two volumes of autobiography, and Vanishing Cornwally an eloquent evocation of her beloved countryside that is such a strong feature of her fiction. Daphne du Maurier, who was married to Lieutenant-General Sir Frederick Browning, KCVO, DSO, was made a DBE in 1969. When she died in 1989, Margaret Forster wrote in tribute: 'No other popular writer has so triumphantly defied classification ... She satisfied all the questionable criteria of popular fiction, and yet satisfied too the exaeting requirements of "real literature", something very few novelists ever do.'