Myself When Young

Published in 2020 (first published 1977)
224 pages

epub



Dame Daphne du Maurier (1907-1989) wrote more than twenty-five acclaimed novels, short stories, and plays, including Rebecca, Jamaica Inn, and The House on the Strand. She was also a passionate and skillful chronicler of her own remarkable family, which included artists, actors, speculators, writers, military men and courtesans. This is one of three of her finest biographical works that was reissued.

What is this book about?
“An intimate view of a creative personality…as richly evocative as any of her novels.” —Los Angeles Times

Both in her novels and her memoirs, Daphne du Maurier revealed an ardent desire to explore her family’s history. In Myself When Young, based on diaries she kept between 1920 and 1932, du Maurier probes her own past, beginning with her earliest memories and encompassing the publication of her first book and her marriage. Often painfully honest, she recounts her difficult relationship with her father, her education in Paris, her early love affairs, her antipathy towards London life, and her desperate ambition to succeed as a writer. The resulting self-portrait is of a complex, utterly captivating young woman.