The day after her 20th birthday, Daphne was allowed to remain at Swiss Cottage while her family went back to London. It was the first time she had ever lived alone and achieved the peace and solitude she needed to write. She talked with local families, went for long walks, watched boats being laden with china clay as they still are today and shouted for the ferry when she wanted to cross over to Fowey. She sailed and rowed; a much-reproduced photograph shows her pulling valiantly at the oars, Swiss Cottage in the background. She saw a ship go aground and all its passengers brought to safety, a scene she would depict in Rebecca.

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Her prowlings around the woods near Fowey led her one day to a large abandoned house called Menabilly. She visited it again and again, enchanted with its ivy-covered exterior. Glimpses through its shutters of tattered wallpaper, ancestral portraits and other evidence of faded grandeur held great significance for her. Once she crept through a window and found a battered rocking horse in the nursery and a rusty corkscrew on the mantel. It would eventually be the setting for three novels, most notably Rebecca, where Menabilly, along with the memory of another house she had visited as a child, became Manderley.

One day she saw a derelict schooner, Jane Slade, rotting away, its once-proud figurehead slipping into the mud. The Slade family gave her access to their family papers, and she turned them into her first book, a romantic novel. In 1931 popular romances were rather new, and reviewers were at a loss as to what to make of The Loving Spirit, but they generally reviewed it favorably. The Slade family gave her the figurehead, and today it is mounted under the eaves of Ferryside.

Encouraged by sales of The Loving Spirit, her publisher issued a book of her short stories, I’ll Never Be Young Again. As an additional bonus, dashing Major Tommy Browning piloted his cabin cruiser into the harbor one day, determined to meet the author of The Loving Spirit. They married in 1932 and divided their time between Hampstead and Fowey.

One day in 1936, Daphne and a friend rode horses through the “dark, diabolical beauty” of nearby Bodmin Moor. Lost for hours in mist and rain, they fell at midnight into a welcome hostelry, Jamaica Inn. Built in 1750 as a coaching house for travelers from Launceston to Bodmin, Jamaica Inn soon became the dropping-off point for contraband, including tea, tobacco, silk and brandy. (It probably took its name from the latter.) Daphne’s vivid imagination soon put the inn into one of her most successful books, filled with smugglers, cutthroats and, of course, forbidden love. Reviewed as “perhaps the most accomplished historical romance ever written,” Jamaica Inn was later released as a film, directed by Alfred Hitchcock, with Maureen O’Hara as heroine Mary Yellan and Charles Laughton as Sir Humphrey Pengallan.

Today visitors can still dine and sleep at the inn. There, a sound-and-light show takes them to the world of smugglers, some of Daphne’s artifacts are on view and one of 15 assorted ghosts might appear in their bedrooms or gallop ominously through the courtyard. (Oddly, Daphne seems never to have depicted ghosts in her books, not even the woman in blue said to look out of a window at Menabilly.) A few miles to the east is the village of Altarnum, where Daphne made the vicar of the “Cathedral of the Moors” the villain of her story. Hawk’s Tor, Kilmarth Tor, Twelve Men’s Moor and Trewartha Tor are other landmarks mentioned in Jamaica Inn.

World War II found Tommy in various wartime positions. As a lieutenant-general in the Grenadier Guards, he supervised the Sixth Airborne Corps’ landing at Normandy and played an important role in the Battle of Arnhem, always accompanied by his “Boys,” a briefcase full of teddy bears. Daphne, with their three children, rented a small cottage called Readymoney on Readymoney Cove, Fowey. Privately owned today, the house is surrounded by lovely gardens that are open to the public on occasion.

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