Returning home once again to the windswept Cornish countryside, I am always struck by the stark contrast between life in Cambridge and life back home. Our friendly people, squat cottages, and homely accent mark the two as opposites. But it is in the inimitable Cornish countryside where I feel the difference most keenly.

Daphne du Maurier’s vivid descriptions of the Cornish countryside provide an infamous character reference for our county within classic literature. The London-born dame spent much of her adult life among these rugged cliffs and rolling hills, which naturally became settings for her most famous novels like Rebecca, My Cousin Rachel, Frenchman’s Creek, and The Jamaica Inn.

“Rather than celebrating the place that she came to call home, she conforms to an all-too-common narrative which condemns rural Britain to a murky past”

Yet, on closer inspection, du Maurier animates the Cornish countryside as a malevolent conspirator in the murders, mysteries, and madness of a distant upper class. Rather than celebrating the place that she came to call home, she conforms to an all-too-common narrative which condemns rural Britain to a murky past.

Du Maurier’s 20th-century Cornwall is depicted as something little more than a barren postcard, as rich holiday-makers brush past “dull-witted and uncommunicative” cottage-folk to enjoy long drives, yachting, and afternoon tea in their escape from the city. Before the urban masses came to break nature’s perpetual silence, she tells us how the innumerable coves, “never seen and never known,” were ruled by a cruel, unforgiving wind and even the birds would hide from the merciless, swollen tide.

Having dismissed the local people to total insignificance, du Maurier’s Cornwall takes centre stage as an ancient, pre-Edenic jungle, described as if she were a chronicler discovering a far-off land. The famous opening of Rebecca —“Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again…”— speaks of the plants that have reclaimed the untended grounds as “half-breeds” which have “gone native,” whilst the manor house itself remains miraculously untouched, glistening milky white in the moonlight.

“du Maurier’s Cornwall takes centre stage as an ancient, pre-Edenic jungle, described as if she were a chronicler discovering a far-off land”

It is only the eloquently demonised landscapes that du Maurier paints as distinctly Cornish. The grand properties which star in almost every tale are rare, foreign stains against the county’s green canvas, interrupted only by farmhouses or unassuming towns. They represent a silent but very real upper class whose wealth affords them a paradoxical rural hideout: perfect replicas of metropolitan architecture are hidden among woods or atop cliffs that would be otherwise ruled by “jungle law”, and crucially remain free from the grubby fingers of uneducated villagers.

The real buildings which inspired du Maurier’s twisted Cornwall, including Rebecca’s Menabilly Estate and the titular Jamaica Inn, now provide a tourist attraction for modern city dwellers looking to get a taste of this bygone era of dark grandeur. Like far too many authors, du Maurier’s novels perpetuate a dated dichotomy, inaugurated by the Romantics, of a hauntingly beautiful, dangerous countryside and a fast-paced, modern civilisation.

The issue of classic literature and its depiction of rural landscapes is that such destinations become inextricably linked to the past, as if time stands still in the moors, lakes, and crumbling buildings are kept ‘authentic’ by locals dependent on tourism. 

Like her gothic predecessors, Daphne du Maurier paints scenes of immortal, isolated locations that appear to exist outside the passage of time. Her characters, whilst vivid and complex, exist for but a moment in the vast history of the settings they occupy, and their deaths or disappearances appear merely the return to an unadulterated past. The ocean’s rough surface might bubble and swell for a time as it swallows yet another helpless woman, but quickly her hand is out of sight and the sea resumes its restless slumber, an undefeated adversary.

Whether in Rebecca’s mysterious drowning or Rachel’s fatal plunge onto the rocks, nature itself is personified by du Maurier as a conspirator of death, a malignant force which might even be conscious of its own “spurious origin” – presumably Hell, or something older. Disturbed waves, jagged rocks, and misty moors drive troubled characters to extreme action, absolving murderers of their sin for the influence of a malicious Mother Nature.

And in the wake of human cruelty, it is again nature’s ruggedness which saves men from the noose; a ship crushed by a storm, a bridge brought down by the wind, or a footstep stolen by an unstable cliffside obscure the truth so well that even the intelligent perpetrators of du Maurier’s novels find themselves unsure of the events. 

As modern readers of classic literature, extrapolating these romantic worlds onto our reality brings up fascinating and often troubling questions. What of the people who continue to inhabit such places? Will we be choked by nameless black shrubs and twisted branches, the enemies of progress and civilisation?

In Cambridge, anything is possible; literature expands rather than shrinks the world of the student reader, and it is easy to dismiss books that are inaccurate or irrelevant to you. Coming from a place with a small literary canon whose only well-known depiction is as a hostile, backwards, and bitter wilderness, the written world feels more like a prison. Daphne du Maurier’s entrancing plots continue to enthrall, but her masterfully twisted impression of rural Cornwall condemns our county to a dark, fictional past, and its people to anonymity.

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