Daphne: the truth behind the story

I've been thinking about some of the responses and comments on 'Daphne', after Dovegreyreader's review of the novel -- for which many thanks -- and I thought I'd pick up on the discussion about the blurring of fact and fiction in my book. It's based on a true story about an episode in Daphne du Maurier's life, and I've spent several years researching it, but I always knew that I wanted to write it as a novel. This is because Daphne herself was a consummate master (mistress?) of blurring these boundaries, and I was inspired to follow her example, given that she is a literary heroine of mine, as well as being the heroine of my novel. Her first novel, "The Loving Spirit" (the title is taken from a line of Emily Bronte's poetry) was based on her research into the history of a real family in Fowey; a subsequent novel, "Julius", appears to be, at least in part, a veiled portrait of her father, the actor Gerald du Maurier. Julius is a charming, charismatic yet ruthless man who drowns his 25 year old daughter, because he cannot bear the thought of her being with another man. Daphne was 25 when she wrote this novel, and it seems likely she was drawing on her own experience of her father's intense jealousy and inappropriately possessive feelings towards her (when she announced her engagement. for example, her father burst into tears and said, "That's not fair!"). Gerald read the novel, though died shortly afterwards (and it's interesting how often sexual desire is linked with death in Du Maurier's writing). In the wake of his death, Daphne wrote a non fiction biography of her father, "Gerald", which reads more like a novel -- she refers to herself in the third person within it, as "Daphne" -- and some of her family were shocked that she revealed so much about him, including his dark streak of melancholy and depression.
Most intriguing of all is the autobiographical element within "Rebecca". She was inspired to create the fictional Manderley by a real house, Menabilly, which she had discovered whilst holidaying at her parents' house in Fowey, on the coast of Cornwall. At this point -- the late 1920s -- Menabilly was falling into ruin, but Daphne was enchanted by it -- this "house of secrets", in her words, hidden by dense forest from the road and the sea. When she started writing "Rebecca" in 1937, she was terribly homesick for England -- Cornwall in particular -- having traveled to Alexandria to be with her husband, Tommy Browning, during his army posting abroad. Menabilly was summoned up in her imagination as Manderley -- and after the enormous success of the novel (and its film version by Hitchcock), she was able to afford to lease the real house that had been such a dominant presence in her novel. Thus she was living in Rebecca's house in the postwar period that my novel is set...
She had also drawn on her own experience in several other ways, whilst writing "Rebecca". For example, early in her marriage, she had discovered a cache of love letters in the back of Tommy's desk, from a beautiful dark haired girl named Jan Ricardo that Tommy had been engaged to, before he met Daphne. She found herself feeling haunted by this previous lover -- who she imagined as far more glamorous and sophisticated, an insecurity that she made manifest in the narrator of "Rebecca", the shy, nameless second Mrs de Winter.
But after Rebecca was published, Jan killed herself, and Daphne became increasingly preoccupied by the idea that she, in killing off Rebecca in the novel, might have somehow contributed to Jan's death.
I could go on and on with more of this -- and I've written more in an essay for the Telegraph, which appeared alongside an extract from Daphne (and you'll find the link in the list on this page) -- but perhaps I should stop here, before giving away the entire plot of my novel. Even so, do let me know if you'd like to me to answer your questions...