Chapter 18 Daphne du Maurier and Alfred Hitchcock Richard Allen Born in London’s East End in 1899 at the end of the Victorian era, Alfred Hitchcock, the son of a Catholic family in the greengrocery trade, made his first film, The Pleasure Garden, in 1925. Given his lower middle-class background, his facility as a graphic artist, his practical bent, and his interest in theater, it was unsurprising that this clever, ambi- tious young man should be drawn to the new medium of film. Daphne du Maurier was born in 1907 near London’s Regent’s Park, a distinctly posher side of the town than Hitchcock, to the most successful actor of the Edwardian period, Gerald du Maurier. Du Maurier hailed from a cultured and literary family with French Catholic ancestry, though the “du” in du Maurier was a fiction she subsequently exposed. Her grandfather was the renowned Victorian sketch artist and novelist George du Maurier. She wrote her first book, The Loving Spirit, in 1931. Both the novelist and the filmmaker chose to work in popular narrative idioms that combined “romance” with “murder mystery” and achieved an unprecedented success with the public that was inversely proportional to the guarded response accorded to their work by arbiters of taste. It was for their popularity more than their perceived stature as artists that Hitchcock was knighted and du Maurier was made a Dame. However, both artists undercut the ostensibly conservative character of the popular romance by exploring dimen- sions of human perversity contained within it, not simply as a foil to dramatize the growth, development, and triumph of the heterosexual couple, but also as the primary source of fascination and allure. Furthermore, both authors used the short story format (Hitchcock through his TV shows) to circumvent and subvert the romance narrative altogether. Hitchcock inhabited and was partly responsible for the triumph of American popular cul- ture in Europe in the decades after World War II; du Maurier, on the other hand, though she showed an interest in film, despised that culture, and satirized an American takeover A Companion to Literature and Film Edited by Robert Stam and Alessandra Raengo Copyright © 2004 Blackwell Publishing Ltd