Frenchman’s Creek by Daphne du Maurier, reviewed by Eva Leung

An image of a UK first edition of Frenchman's Creek

Genre: Contemporary fiction, Suspense, Romance
Original Publication: 1941

Bored with the superficial court life and a passionless marriage, Lady Dona St Columb seeks refuge with her two young children, James and Henrietta, at Navron, her husband Harry’s estate in Cornwall. There she meets and falls in love with Jean-Benoit Aubéry, a French pirate and a wanted man.

Dona throws caution into the wind and, disguising herself as a cabin boy, she joins the Frenchman in his adventures and heists.

Daphne du Maurier is often wrongly named a writer of romantic fiction. In fact, Frenchman’s Creek is the only novel out of the seventeen she has written that is, according to her biographer Margaret Forster, “a romance with a capital ‘R’” and “purely escapist fiction”. Written and published during the Second World War, Frenchman’s Creek was meant to be a happier tale with elements of passion and adventure, but it turned out to be a projection of a lot of the author’s own sentiments and struggles, as she based the character of Jean-Benoit Aubéry on her lover during the war years, Christopher Puxley, and also on the imaginary man she felt she would like to have been. The creek was where the author spent her honeymoon with her husband, Major Tommy Browning, as she explained in an interview (Interview here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ixg6XYbDYD8&list=PLUNpguq0JL7X-zfSqMpJvqr8jlPe7gJTg.

The novel presented a fantasy for housewives – engaging in a whirlwind romance and embarking on adventures that were otherwise denied to them because of their gender during that era. This was one of the novels that gave du Maurier her fame. It was made into a film in 1944 starring Joan Fontaine and later a television movie in 1998 starring Tara FitzGerald.

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