The Mischief Makers by Elisabeth Gifford – A New Novel about Daphne du Maurier and J.M. Barrie

The front cover of Elisabeth Gifford's new novel

‘Tis strange - but true; for truth is always strange;
Stranger than fiction; If it could be told,
How much would novels gain by the exchange!
How differently the world would men behold!
How oft would vice and virtue places change
The new world would be nothing to the old,
If some Columbus of the moral seas
Would show mankind their souls' antipodes.   

George Gordon Byron (Lord Byron), Don Juan, Canto the Fourteenth, Verse 101, 1823. 

English poet and peer Lord Byron (1788 – 1824) is attributed as being the first person to say that 'truth is stranger than fiction' in his epic poem, Don Juan.

Samuel Langhorne Clemens (1835-1910) was known by his pen name, Mark Twain.  He was an American writer, essayist and humorist.  He also used the quote, but much later, in his travelogue, Following the Equator: A Journey Around the World, published in 1897.

Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; truth isn't. 

His quote clearly endorses what Byron had been saying earlier.  It highlights the idea that events in real life can be more surprising and unusual than anything imagined in fiction.  

There can be no doubt that one of the most remarkable true stories that is undoubtedly stranger than fiction is the life of J.M. Barrie and, in particular, his association with the lives of the du Maurier and Llewelyn Davies families.

James Matthew Barrie(1860 – 1937) was born in Kirriemuir in Scotland, the son of a weaver.  He was brought up in a small weaver's cottage with his mother, father and nine siblings, although two of the children had died before he was born.  He had a good general education, studied literature at the University of Edinburgh, and went on to begin his writing career as a journalist, then a novelist and playwright.  He was very successful, became extremely wealthy and is best remembered for being the creator of Peter Pan and benefactor of Great Ormond Street Hospital, to whom he gifted the rights of Peter Pan in 1929. 

But, and this is a very big but, tragedy, and the tragic deaths of the people around him chequered Barrie's life. 

The first example of this was the death of his older brother David in a skating accident just before his 14th birthday and when James was only six years old.  David was the apple of his mother's eye, and his death devastated her.  James did everything he could to try to fill the gap that David left, wearing his clothes and talking and whistling like his older brother.  

The one thing that seems to have comforted James's mother was that her dead son would stay a boy forever; he would never grow up, he would always be as she remembered him.

The connection between J.M. Barrie and the du Maurier family seems to have begun with James's fascination with George du Maurier's (1834 – 1896) first novel, Peter Ibbetson, written late on in George's life in 1891.  There does not seem to be anything documented to suggest that George du Maurier and J.M. Barrie ever met.  However, Peter Ibbetson made a considerable impact on James in a number of ways.  Probably the first of what became a succession of examples was that George owned a St Bernard dog, which he called Chang.  The character Peter, in Peter Ibbetson, also owned a St Bernard dog that he called Porthos.  J.M. Barrie bought his bride, Mary Ansell, a St Bernard dog and named him Porthos after the dog in Peter Ibbetson. 

George du Maurier and his wife Emma had five children: Beatrix (Trixie), Guy, Sylvia, May and Gerald.  Sylvia and her husband, Arthur Llewelyn Davies, had five sons: George, Jack, Peter, Michael and Nico.  Gerald and his wife, Muriel, of course, had three daughters, Angela, Daphne and Jeanne.  So, Sylvia and Gerald's children were cousins, with Sylvia's boys being a little older than Gerald's girls.

It is possible that J.M. Barrie, having developed a fascination for George du Maurier and having failed to meet him, decided, instead, to get to know George's children; we just don't know for sure, but it is entirely possible that he engineered the initial meetings with Gerald, Sylvia, and her boys.  Incidentally, George's daughter Sylvia's third child, Peter, was named after Peter Ibbetson.  J.M. Barrie also named Peter Pan after Peter Ibbetson, not after Peter Llewelyn Davies, as is often believed.  

So, either accidentally or, more likely, by design, J.M. Barrie became a part of both Sylvia's and Gerald's families' lives.  The extraordinary course of events that followed is beautifully documented in three biographies – J.M. Barrie and the Lost Boys: The Real Story of Peter Pan by Andrew Birkin, published in 1979, Captivated: J.M. Barrie, the du Mauriers and the Dark Side of Neverland by Piers Dudgeon, published in 2008 and The Real Peter Pan: The Tragic Life of Michael Llewelyn Davies, also by Piers Dudgeon, published in 2015. 

The novelist Elisabeth Gifford read these three biographies and was utterly spellbound by the remarkable story that these books uncover.  Having established the connection between J.M. Barrie and Daphne du Maurier, she felt compelled to write a fictionalised version of the story, and with the experience of having already written five historical novels, including The Good Doctor of Warsaw and The Last Lights of St Kilda, she set out to do just that.

Elisabeth grew up in a vicarage in the industrial Midlands.  She studied French literature and world religions at the University of Leeds.  She has a diploma in creative writing from Oxford University Department for Continuing Education and an MA in creative writing from Royal Holloway College.  She is married and has three children, and she lives in Kingston Upon Thames.

Carrying out further research into the life of Daphne du Maurier, Elisabeth read Daphne du Maurier by Margaret Forster, published in 1993, Daphne du Maurier and her Sisters: The Hidden Lives of Piffy, Bird and Bing by Jane Dunn, published in 2013, and Manderley Forever: The Life of Daphne du Maurier by Tatiana de Rosnay, published in 2017.  Elizabeth also found Daphne's own biography, Myself When Young: The Shaping of A Writer and Daphne's Grandson Rupert Tower's chapter on Daphne du Maurier, in the book Jung's Shadow Concept: The Hidden Light and Darkness within Ourselves, which he co-wrote with Christopher Perry, very informative.  She read further du Maurier-related books and spent time in the Special Collections archive at the University of Exeter, where many of Daphne du Maurier's papers are held.  She even stayed in a cottage in the Menabilly woods, which is in itself a magical experience, and at Amhuinnsuidhe Castle on Harris.

So the fictional reimagining of the life of Daphne du Maurier and her curious association with the man who wrote Peter Pan began, and the book was to be called The Mischief Makers.

I know that a lot of our readers at the Daphne du Maurier website are experts on the life and works of Daphne du Maurier.  They may be puzzled or a little confused by biographical facts that have been altered in The Mischief Makers and that, sometimes, time seems to expand or contract a little in the telling of Daphne's story.  But we must never forget that this book is a work of fiction, and enjoy it as an amazing story told in a beautifully constructed novel, and leave the biographical facts to the biographers, many of whom we have already mentioned.

Elisabeth tells the story of Daphne du Maurier's life chronologically, starting in 1911, when she was only four years old, and continuing until 1970, when she had settled into life at Kilmarth.  During the novel, Daphne's actions, thoughts and memories lead us into the lives of other participants in the story, sometimes going back in time, sometimes just moving across to what other members of the family or J.M. Barrie are doing at a particular stage in the story.  We travel through the Edwardian era that Daphne was born into and a time when her father, Gerald, and J.M. Barrie found significant success in the theatre.  We move on through the tragedies of the Great War, the interwar years when Daphne meets and marries Boy Browning, WWII, Daphne's move to Menabilly and her life during the post-war years.  

And all the while, there is something intangible in the background. 

What is it?

Does it resolve? 

Well, you will need to read the book to find out!

If you don't know the story of how J.M. Barrie created the story of Peter Pan for Angela, Daphne and Jeanne du Maurier's cousins, the five Llewelyn Davies boys, and what happened to them afterwards, you will be absolutely captivated by The Mischief Makers, and even if you do already know the background, you will enjoy where Elisabeth has taken this story and how she has reimagined it all, to tell us, in this, her latest wonderful novel. 

 
The Mischief Makers by Elisabeth Gifford is published in Hardback on 5th September 2024. 

Published by Atlantic Books

Imprint: Corvus

ISBN: 9781838959821

Price: £17.99.

Ann Willmore, August 2024.

‹‹ Back