ABSTRACT
Daphne du Maurier’s reputation as merely a “Cornish novelist” is misleading. She certainly felt an enduring affinity with Cornwall; her rebellious, artistic nature found its peripheral geography and dark history appealing and she saw her writing life there as liberating her from the metropolitan codes of feminine dress and behavior she had left behind in London. Throughout her life Daphne du Maurier felt a sense of unease regarding the norms of sexual identity imposed by the culture of her time. She would have been more comfortable with today’s acknowledgment of gender fluidity. Exploiting the links between past and present, du Maurier uses gothic motifs in order to evoke a medieval world in the midst of Italy in the 1960s, complete with fashionable Vespa scooters. Barbarism and horror are not confined to medieval history, however; only two decades before, Europe had suffered the atrocities of fascism on a scale undreamt of by the Old Duke.
