Alfred Hitchcock once described British writer Daphne du Maurier as belonging to “a whole school of feminine literature”. Despite adapting two of her novels and one short story, the director thought of her not just as a “romantic novelist”, but as a writer who wasn’t the heavyweight equal of her male contemporaries.
It's something that's often said (erroneously) about Du Maurier, who is a far more complex and darker writer than a reductive genre label might suggest. And yet Hitchcock is the reason most people know her work. In 1939, he directed Jamaica Inn, followed a year later by Rebecca. The latter remains a melodramatic masterpiece, and faithful to the novel that Angela Carter once said, "shamelessly reduplicated the plot of Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre".
Du Maurier admired Hitchcock's adaptation of Rebecca, but didn't like what he did with The Birds – not surprising given how much he altered the story. The original focuses on a family, particularly on the patriarch, Nat Hocken, but Hitchcock shifted his (male) gaze onto Tippi Hedren's character, Melanie. Reading the short story again (it's one of two new reissues of her classic stories by Virago), there is far more menace – and topicality – in her narrative. Du Maurier's work was consistently interested in nature and landscape, but here she moves away from the aesthetic to the political and environmental in a story about what happens when the local bird population in a Cornwall town turn on a small community.
Hitchcock’s film opted for sound effects and choppy, staccato edits to ramp up the tension. The short story itself is far more claustrophobic, playing on the idea that even at home we’re not safe. Du Maurier explored environmental catastrophe in her work long before others did. The birds’ behaviour represents the perils of climate change – “It was unnatural . . . the change was something connected with the Arctic Circle.” It’s not an overtly political story, but Nat’s wife asks “Can America not help?”, referencing the Cold War (it was published in 1952) and pre-empting the Gulf and Iraq wars.
The six long stories were originally published as The Apple Tree, and republished as The Birds after the success of the film.
Cultural critic Slavoj Zizek believes the stories “should be interpreted through each other, read side by side” – and the moment one does it, one perceives that they form a precise structure.
Reading them together also dispels the myth of Du Maurier as a romance writer. In The Apple Tree, a man believes his late wife has been reincarnated as a garden tree. Du Maurier is not instantly thought of as a feminist writer, but there is a stark discussion of misogyny between men in Kiss Me Again, Stranger: "I blame the war for all that's gone wrong with women. It's the vote that did it. We ought never to have given them the vote".
The second reissue is Don't Look Now, written when Du Maurier was 63. It was her final short story, and one that articulates her own fears about death and mortality. Laura and John go to Venice to get over the death of their child. It's full of doubling – the twins, the child-as- dwarf – a classic horror device, and haunts the reader long after it has ended. Du Maurier liked Nicholas Roeg's film of her story, made in 1973, but the American premiere she attended didn't include the infamous sex scene.
This new edition also includes A Border Line Case, involving a young actress who tries to track down an IRA activist her father knew.
Terrorism, haunted trees, infanticide and murderous dwarves are the work of a great imagination, not the stuff of romance. Du Maurier’s work deserves to be lingered over.
Don't Look Now and The Birds, by Daphne Du Maurier are published by Virago. Sinéad Gleeson hosts The Book Show on RTÉ Radio 1
