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Daphne du Maurier lived in Cornwall for forty years, twenty-five of them in Menabilly, a seventeenth-century house that she described as the most beautiful she had ever seen. Cornwall, a region of mystery and superstition, the home of legendary figures such as King Arthur and Tristan and Iseult, is a landscape easily made Gothic; it is the home, as well, of pirates both fictional and historical, with a coastline that has been responsible for innumerable shipwrecks. While never a fully assimilated Cornishwoman, du Maurier was certainly inspired by her adopted home, the setting of some of her best and best-known novels: Jamaica Inn (1936), Frenchman's Creek (1941), and The House on the Strand (1969). In these, and in others to a lesser degree, one finds a strong sense of place: Cornwall and Menabilly are made a dramatic part of the works, like Thomas Hardy's Dorset, D. H. Lawrence's Nottinghamshire, and, even more so, the Brontës' Yorkshire, whose moors also inspired that sense of Gothic passion, romance, and horror that characterizes du Maurier's Cornish works.
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