It is, therefore, not surprising that du Maurier took time out from her many successful novels to write a history of Cornwall (1967) and a biography of Branwell Brontë (1960).
Du Maurier was intrigued by history--especially the history of her own family. Her paternal great-great-grandmother, Mary Anne Clarke, had been the mistress of King George III's second son, the duke of York. Clarke was the kind of woman du Maurier wished to be: strong, courageous, and capable of dealing with a man's world on her own terms. While the money inherited from Clarke enabled subsequent generations of du Mauriers to indulge in cultural pursuits, it was Daphne's grandfather, George du Maurier, who was the first artist in the family. Initially a cartoonist for Punch, he later became an illustrator of novels by such authors as Hardy, Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell, George Meredith, and Henry James. Blinded in one eye in middle age, George du Maurier had become a novelist himself, producing Peter Ibbetson in 1891, Trilby in 1894, and The Martian, published posthumously in 1897. Daphne du Maurier's father, Gerald, was an actor who achieved recognition first as Raffles, the popular gentleman burglar created by the novelist E.
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