Daphne du Maurier: The National Book Award Winner’s Male and Female Alternate Personalities

Daphne du Maurier (1907-1989), Lady Browning, Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire, was a novelist, wife, and mother. Her novel, Rebecca, won the National Book Award for 1938. Alfred Hitchcock’s first American movie, “Rebecca,” based on the book, starring Laurence Olivier and Joan Fontaine, won the Academy Award for Best Picture of 1940. Indeed, a number of her stories and novels were made into movies. In short, she was a very successful, well-functioning person.

At the same time, beginning in childhood, she had at least two personalities, one male and one female. She referred to the male personality by different names at different times in her life: “alter ego Eric Avon,” “boy-in-the-box,” narrator, or “personality No. 2.”

“There were no psychological depths to Eric Avon. He just shone at everything…There was a cricket match, and prize-giving, with Eric Avon receiving four prizes, but for what subjects my diary does not state…But it was a sad moment for the captain of cricket. I realized that Eric must now be nearly eighteen, and that this would be his final day at school…I often wonder how he got on at Cambridge, and what became of him. How did he fare in later life?…Yet why did I pick on Eric Avon as an alter ego and not an imaginary Peggy Avon…?…Whatever the reason, he remained in my unconscious, to emerge in later years—though in quite a different guise—as the narrator of the five novels I was to write, at long intervals, in the first person singular, masculine gender, I’ll Never Be Young Again, My Cousin Rachel, The Scapegoat, The Flight of the Falcon, The House on the Strand. None of these characters resembled the popular schoolboy hero, Eric Avon; instead, their personalities can be said to be undeveloped, inadequate, sharing a characteristic that had never been Eric’s, who had dominated…For each of my five narrators depended, for reassurance, on a male friend older than himself…The female narrators—and these have been three in number—depended upon no one but themselves…The only timid one of the trio was the nameless heroine in Rebecca, and she found strength of purpose when she discovered that her husband Maxim truly loved her, and had never cared for this first wife Rebecca” (1, pp. 55-58).

“Her alter ego, ‘Eric Avon’, in whom she believed implicitly, went to Rugby and was bold and fearless and did all the things she would have done if she had been a boy…It was all rather charming and nobody was disturbed, nobody realized quite how much Daphne genuinely hated being a girl. What her family also did not realize, and this was much more serious, was that Daphne actually convinced herself she was a boy” (2, p. 14).

“The boy could sometimes be shut up in the box inside her, it seemed, without causing any strain” (2, p. 39).

“What puzzled [Clara, Daphne’s friend] were the two sides to [Daphne]: on the one hand the genuine love, after all, of the simple life, but on the other the contradiction, to Clara, of a rucksack full of ‘cosmetics, vanishing creams…lotions…and also scents’. Daphne’s clothes fascinated her too: ‘a white jockey cap, socks, mountaineer’s boots with yellow laces, linen blouse and a zip linen skirt on top of white cotton shorts, then in villages she zipped it back up—‘she was feminine…[then] on the yonder side up rolled the skirt and she strode forward like a boy’” (2, pp. 263-264).

“[Daphne] wrote…she had always been able to feel within herself two quite separate personalities—‘When I get madly boyish No. 2 is in charge, and then, after a bit, the situation is reversed.’ The point was that…one had to make friends with No. 2 and say ‘now don’t get carried away…No. 2 can come to the surface and be helpful’. She explained that when she was writing she felt all No. 2—‘he certainly has a lot to do with my writing’—but when she was not, No. 2 caused trouble…But sometimes her No.2 came into its own and she felt ‘a power thing’…Daphne was trying hard to explain the tremendous contradictions she knew existed in her own personality…the problem of aligning her No. 1 and No. 2 as something to do with her writing self being different from her real-life self…’The people I write about in books are more real to me than the people I meet’…in order to function at all she had to suppress her No. 2” (2, pp. 276-279).

“She could tolerate only a few months without writing before being plagued by her discontented No. 2 which had no other outlet” (2, p. 287).

1. Daphne du Maurier. Myself When Young: The Shaping of a Writer. Garden City NY, Doubleday & Company, 1977.

2. Margaret Forster. Daphne du Maurier: The Secret Life of the Renowned Storyteller. New York, Doubleday, 1993.