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Literary Passion · Fowey, Cornwall

Menabilly (Daphne du Maurier's Manderley)

The hidden house du Maurier trespassed into as a young woman and loved all her life — the original of Manderley, whose dreaming opening line the world knows by heart. 'Rebecca' made obsession, jealousy and a dead woman's unseen erotic power into a national bestseller.

StatusFact & fiction
Datedu Maurier leased 1943–1969; Rebecca 1938
The peopleDaphne du Maurier, Rebecca de Winter (fictional)
The siteMenabilly estate (private), near Fowey
Coordinates50.33417, -4.66889 (confidence 2/5)

The story

Daphne du Maurier fell in love with this shuttered Rashleigh mansion near Fowey, first reaching it as a trespasser through the woods, and made it Manderley in Rebecca (1938) — though she never owned it, leasing it only from 1943 to 1969. The novel's true subject is sexual jealousy and the erotic hold of a dead woman, Rebecca, over the unnamed second wife. Its most charged scene has the housekeeper Mrs Danvers lead the young narrator through the dead woman's bedroom, drawing out the nightdress and underclothes and pressing her to touch them — a seduction conducted through a corpse's belongings, and unmistakably erotic. Du Maurier described her own sexuality in her own terms, as a hidden masculine self, "the boy in the box"; her biographer Margaret Forster documents her obsession with Ellen Doubleday and probable affair with the actress Gertrude Lawrence. Menabilly remains a private Rashleigh home and is not open to the public.

More stories at this spot

The house that would not be bought

Du Maurier tried for years to buy Menabilly outright and never could; the Rashleighs would only ever lease. When the lease finally ran out in 1969, four years after her husband's death, she moved a mile off to Kilmarth — the dower house of the same estate — which became the setting of The House on the Strand. She had spent a quarter of a century restoring, loving and writing a house that was never hers to keep.

Sources

Nearby on the map

Notable LandmarksPadstow 'Obby 'Oss May Day FestivalPadstow, Cornwall · England

Cornwall's riotous May Day rite where being caught under the 'Oss means a baby (or a husband) within the year. The 'ancient pagan fertility rite' story is a 20th-century folklorist invention (per Ronald Hutton), though the custom itself is genuinely old.

Documented historyTragic RomanceTintagel Castle (Tristan & Iseult)Tintagel, Cornwall · England

The wave-battered headland bound by legend to Tristan and Iseult — the knight sent to fetch his king's bride, the love-potion drunk in error, the doomed passion that medieval Europe told and retold. Folklore, and labelled so; the drama of the place is entirely factual.

LegendNotable LandmarksMên-an-TolMadron, Cornwall · England

Cornwall's famous fertility stone — crawl through the ring to conceive. The fertility/healing folklore is genuinely recorded, though the 'seven times at full moon' formula is largely a modern accretion.

Documented history

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