Myself When Young: The Shaping of a Writer

by Daphne Du Maurier (Author), Daphne Du Maurier (Author), Daphne Du Maurier (Author)

• Used

  Paperback
  1978

  $4.30

• Used

  Paperback
  1993

  $3.49

  Pinpointing the literary influences and the first stirrings of books to be written in later years, this is Daphne du Maurier's story of her early life, in the years before she wrote her celebrated novels, Rebecca , Frenchman's Creek and Jamaica Inn . It is a relaxed evocation of her first 24 years, a world of famous names, of idyllic summers in Regent's Park and Hampstead, of dinner parties and flirtations, nocturnal excursions and grand winter holidays in Switzerland, Brittany and Paris - and the house by the river in Cornwall. The book provides clues to du Maurier's enigmatic personality and the passion for Menabilly and Cornwall that was to dominate her life.

• New

  Paperback
  2004

  $13.27

  Both her novels and her non-fiction reveal Daphne du Maurier's overwhelming desire to explore her family's history. In Myself When Young, based on diaries that she kept from 1920-1932, the most famous du Maurier probes her own past, beginning with her earliest memories and encompassing the publication of her first book and her subsequent marriage. Here, the writer is open and sometimes painfully honest about the difficult relationship with her father; her education in Paris; early love affairs; her antipathy towards London life and the theatre; her intense love for Cornwall and her desperate ambition to succeed as a writer. The resulting portrait is of a captivating and complex character.