Daphne wrote and resumed her obsession with Menabilly, which she called “my Mena.” She frequently led her children on long tramps through the beech woods to the wrought-iron gates. Up the gravel path they went to spy on the house, which by now had been abandoned for 20 years. She actually pushed her face into the ivy to kiss the brick walls of the long, two-story house, insisting that it was hers “by right of love.”

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Menabilly was originally a Tudor building, although only some stone-mullioned windows, paneling and cellars survived its 17th-century makeover. It had been built so it could not be seen from the sea, except from one secret spot. Daphne spent many hours persuading the absentee owner, a Dr. Rashleigh, to let it to her, and at last she succeeded in getting Menabilly for a peppercorn rent, provided she maintain it. But because it was entailed on the Rashleigh family, there was no chance of her ever owning it.

“Here was a block of stone, even as the desert Sphinx, made by man for his own purpose—yet she had a personality that was hers alone, without the touch of human hand,” she wrote of the house in which she lived for 26 years.

Every inch of Menabilly needed redoing, from plumbing and electricity to painting and furnishing. Daphne, who hated housecleaning, worked along with whomever she could persuade to help her. In 1943 she happily moved her family in and had everything ready to greet Tommy when he got leave that Christmas.

The children, Tessa, Flavia and Kits, were not as enchanted with Menabilly as their mother. There was no central heating, and the bedrooms were frigid in winter. Rats, bats and beetles abounded, ferns and fungus grew out of the walls, and the north wing was off limits because it was in danger of collapse. Daphne did her writing in a garden hut. She wrote The King’s General after discovering that there was a skeleton bricked up in the cellar, with nothing but a table, a trencher and a pair of Cavalier shoes for company. After Rebecca and Frenchman’s Creek achieved popularity, visitors, including American GIs, boldly flocked to the grounds unannounced and unwanted. Today there is no public access to Menabilly, and it can barely be glimpsed through the trees.

In June 1969, four years after Tommy’s death, Daphne was forced to leave Menabilly. Her lease had already been extended by several years. Dr. Rashleigh had died, and his nephew and heir understandably wanted to move in. He let her rent nearby Kilmarth, a house that was part of the Rashleigh estate. It was smaller and brighter than Menabilly, easier to keep up and located on a cliff overlooking the sea. Daphne added quarters in the back, where her grandchildren could make noise without disturbing her.

Older residents of Fowey still remember her driving her little red car at breakneck pace, reversing the wrong way in one-way streets while shouting a cheery, “They know me here!” Although she found it painful, Daphne occasionally walked in the grounds of Menabilly, and eventually she visited the new owners. She lived at Kilmarth until her death in 1985, after several sad years of depression, writer’s block and failing memory.

Daphne was made a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1952 and a Dame of the British Empire in 1969. In 1977 she won the Mystery Writers of America Grand Master Award, and in 1996 her face and typewriter graced a British postage stamp.

Along with Jamaica Inn, Hitchcock would direct film versions of The Birds and Rebecca, in which he called the famously unnamed heroine “Daphne.” Other directors took on French­man’s Creek; Hungry Hill; Don’t Look Now; My Cousin Rachel, starring Richard Burton and Olivia de Havilland; and The Scapegoat, which was given a different ending. There have been two television versions of Rebecca, while Hitchcock’s film went on limited rerelease in Britain in 2006, generating at least one review revealing sinister meanings that most readers would never suspect.

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