Daphne: A Portrait of Daphne Du Maurier by Judith Cook (HQ651)

Published 1999: First Edition / Hardcover / Excellent Condition / Illustrated throughout

Original orange cloth with gilt titles on the spine and original pictorial dust jacket. 322 as new very clean and bright pages. Slight shelf wear might be expected. (HQ651)

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One of Daphne du Maurier's earliest works was a history of her family, particularly of her grandfather George du Maurier, the "Punch" cartoonist and author of "Trilby", and her father, the actor Gerald. But it was as a popular novelist that she would excel, and by the end of the 1930s "Rebecca" was a literary phenomenon, translated into 20 languages. Daphne's father was fiercely possessive of her, but at the age of 25 she married "Boy" Browning, then the youngest major in the British Army, and soon settled in the Cornish mansion which was featured in "Rebecca" and around which the plot of "The King's General" was constructed. Her sense of place and atmosphere and gift of story-telling ensured a succession of bestselling novels such as "Jamaica Inn", "Frenchman's Creek" and "My Cousin Rachel". After her husband's death she moved to another mansion which became the setting for "The House on the Strand", and became increasingly removed from family and friends until her death. The author has written books on Shakespeare and Elizabethan drama. She knew Daphne du Maurier in the 1960s, has studied her novels and adapted "The King's General" for the theatre.

https://www.amazon.ie/Daphne-Portrait-Du-Maurier/dp/

Judith Cook
Through the columns of the Guardian women's page, edited by the late Mary Stott, Judith Cook founded the anti-nuclear organisation Voice of Women after the Cuban missile crisis of 1962, when the world seemed on the verge of nuclear war and she was the mother of two young children.

From that first Guardian article, Judith received more than 2,000 letters from women responding to her call. She went to both Moscow and Washington with other campaigners to protest against nuclear weapons. Voice of Women grew in strength and influence, and Judith joined other anti-nuclear organisations demonstrating against the testing and proliferation of nuclear weapons throughout the 1960s.

Judith and her husband Douglas Cook, whom she married in 1952, had, by then, moved from the Essex suburbs to near Penzance, Cornwall. Together they produced a newsletter, and saw the organisation grow and strengthen. They had four children, and Judith continued to write for the Guardian women's page.

She also published books on JB Priestley and Daphne du Maurier; she was due to give a talk to the Du Maurier festival, in Fowey, Cornwall, the day before her death. Her most famous book was probably Who Killed Hilda Murrell? (1985), which led her into the dangerous waters of investigation by the police and the security services.

Murrell was a well known anti-nuclear campaigner, who was found dead in March 1984 near her Shrewsbury home, just before she was due to present a paper on the hazards of nuclear waste to the Sizewell-B nuclear power station inquiry. Her nephew was Commander Robert Green, who had served with naval intelligence during the Falklands war (he is now an anti-nuclear campaigner in New Zealand).

Judith wrote a second book about Murrell, linking her death to the Falklands war and the controversy surrounding the sinking of the Argentinian cruiser, the Genral Belgrano. Her play about the Murrell affair was presented at a number of small theatres, and at Stratford East, London.