‘Daphne du Maurier and Her Sisters: The Hidden Lives of Piffy, Bird and Bing’, by Jane Dunn – review

Jane Dunn is something of a specialist on sisterhood. She has — we learn from the dedication — five sisters of her own; she has already written a book about the sisters Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell, and another about the cousins Elizabeth I and Mary, Queen of Scots. Now the du Maurier sisters are in line to capture the public imagination like the Brontës or the Mitfords, their group celebrity fortified by genuine claims to fame. The fascination for readers is the different character and destiny of each sister, plus their relationships with one another and with the dynamics of the family romance —  and few family romances have been more potent than that of the du Mauriers.

The popular, successful actor and theatre manager Sir Gerald du Maurier had three daughters. The middle one was the famous writer Daphne du Maurier, born in 1907. She has already attracted much biographical attention, unlike the eldest, Angela, or the youngest, Jeanne.

Their childhood was dominated by their exciting and emotionally demanding father, ‘the shining sun in his young daughters’ lives’. On stage he played both Mr Darling and Captain Hook in Peter Pan, and in the nursery, where J.M. Barrie was a frequent visitor, Peter Pan was enacted by the girls: Daphne was always Peter, the ‘ageless seductive boy’, with whom she identified. Angela was always Wendy — she played her professionally, as a young woman — and Jeanne was whoever Daphne told her to be.

Their father, something of a Peter Pan himself, did not want anyone to grow up. Angela was 12 before she learned that Father Christmas did not exist. Daphne, in spite of flirtations which involved kisses, did not know the facts of life until she was 18.