In Love and War by Liz Byrski

Author:Liz Byrski
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Fremantle Press
Published: 2015-08-14T16:00:00+00:00

It’s good to have time away from the books, the cuttings, and the notes and transcripts that are piled up on the floor on either side of the small desk in the Hartfield studio. We have rented a house in the heart of Fowey, a small picturesque town typical of many on the Cornish coast: steep, winding streets, where the doors of white-painted cottages open onto the cobbles and window boxes overflow with geraniums and pansies. The house is close to the quay on the banks of the River Fowey. From my bedroom window I can see across the estuary to the village of Bodinnick, where fishing boats bob at anchor and clusters of old cottages and patches of woodland are scattered across the hillside. Fowey was, for many years, the home of one of my favourite writers, the late Daphne du Maurier, an author who was often dismissed as ‘too romantic’ or ‘too concerned with women’s things’ to be taken seriously by the twentieth-century literary modernists. But, while ignored in literary circles, she was widely published in Britain and overseas and had a huge and devoted readership. It was here that du Maurier wrote several of her much-loved novels and specifically Rebecca, which was published in 1938. The initial print run of twenty thousand copies was astoundingly large for the time but within the first month more than twice that number of copies had been sold. Rebecca continued to sell in big numbers throughout the war and has never been out of print since then. A little further inland from the town is Menabilly, the house which was the inspiration for Manderley in the novel, and which du Maurier was able to rent and live in for more than twenty years. And from the deck of the ferry that crosses the estuary from Fowey to the nearby port of Mevagissey, you can see the beach that was the setting for the boathouse — the hideaway for Rebecca’s romantic trysts. It’s great writer country, wild, romantic, beautiful and always slightly haunting.

Despite the pleasures of being with my family in this gorgeous place, I can’t get Joyce’s story out of my head and I know it is that combination of innocence, ignorance and shame that has disturbed me in a very personal way. Women’s lack of information about sex, sexuality and their own bodies is tied to centuries of the ownership of women’s sexuality by men, and further disempowerment at the hands of male-dominated organised religion, and the medical and psychiatric professions. In the 1940s both men and women knew a great deal less about sex than they do today when we can all see on television and the internet things that were never spoken of in the comparatively recent past. The Mass Observation diaries of the 1940s revealed that by the end of that decade only eleven per cent of the population had received any sexual education from their mothers, and six per cent from their fathers. Parents were themselves

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