Word: maurier
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FRENCHMAN'S CREEK-Daphne du Maurier-Doubleday, Doran...
Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca, one of the three best-selling novels of 1939, was an exceedingly well-told problem story of the troubles of being a second wife; it was tailor-made for the land of high divorce rates. Frenchman's Creek, just as well-told, is even nearer that bull's-eye where best-sellers are scored: the heart of the U.S. housewife...
This other Dona (whom thousands of Miss du Maurier's readers know as "the real me,") knew that "life need not be bitter, nor worthless, nor bounded by a narrow casement, but could be limitless, infinite-that it meant suffering, and love, and danger, and sweetness, and more than this even, much more." How much more, Miss du Maurier wisely neglects to say; but she does bring on, as Dona's lover, the one sort of man who could conceivably supply it: a Frenchman (They Understand Love). He is a philosophical pirate, as tired of the world...
Every payday he bought more books. Du Maurier suggested Dumas, De Musset, Villon (he picked up French) ; De Quincey brought him toward Wordsworth; Hazlitt, by devious means, to the metaphysicians. He read The Origin of Species and a life of Buddha; he bought a Gray's Anatomy and set his hopes toward medicine. Those hopes were forgotten when he happened on Chaucer, Keats and Shelley, who opened "a world where incredible beauty was daily bread and breath of life...
...guests as Edward of Wales (who gave her his picture inscribed "To Gertrude?Edward P."); Manhattan Socialite Bertrand L. Taylor; Douglas Fairbanks Jr. (who gave her a 30-foot cabin cruiser); Peruvian Artist Reynaldo Luza; Adventure Writer Edgar Wallace; and her distinguished leading man, the late Sir Gerald du Maurier (who, despite his distinction, she describes as having been "just like an inky schoolboy with frogs in his pocket...