FREEDAPHNE DU MAURIER AND HER SISTERS: THE HIDDEN LIVES OF PIFFY, BIRD AND BING EBOOK Jane Dunn | 448 pages | 23 Sep 2014 | HarperCollins Publishers | 9780007347094 | English | London, United Kingdom Daphne du Maurier and her Sisters: The Hidden Lives of Piffy, Bird and Bing by Jane Dunn Biographies of artists ofen ignore Bird and Bing interaction Daphne du Maurier and Her Sisters: The Hidden Lives of Piffy siblings in favour of parent-child bonds, although those parallel life-trajectories, success stories and rivalries can tell us much. Privileged young women in the early years of the 20th century, educated Bird and Bing home and in Paris, they moved among a glamorous set of figures such as Rudolph Valentino, Ivor Novello, Gertrude Bird and Bing, Laurence Olivier and Nelly Melba. During turbulent political times, they gadded about between the Savoy Hotel and country houses, flitting to five-star hotels in Monte Carlo, Algiers and Switzerland. Enjoying protected lives, they were cared for by devoted governesses and given opportunities by their wealthy bohemian father. They might have become minor actresses and wives of famous men enjoying a comfortable metropolitan existence. What they all did, however, was turn their backs on the parental theatrical world, move to Cornwall, and develop artistic careers. Angela wrote ten novels and two memoirs; Jeanne studied fine art and later became a modernist painter, part of the St Ives Society of Artists, alongside Barbara Hepworth and Ben Nicolson. From an early age, the middle sister Daphne became an bestselling literary celebrity. In her frank memoir, Angela du Maurier describes an encounter with a fellow guest at a fashionable hotel. The woman gushed all over her; Angela realised her mistake and said she was not Daphne. Bird and Bing only was Daphne acknowledged as the most beautiful, but she effortlessly attracted male and female admirers; achieved fame, long critical and popular success, and riches from a productive output of fiction and non-fiction. She married a prominent Army hero, Tommy Browning, with whom she produced three children. Neither Angela nor Jeanne married but travelled extensively and expressed themselves artistically. Both admired and were in awe of their famous sister, though she had little time for their artistic production. Daphne's uneasy response to Angela's brave novel of love between women was to advise her to write short stories or a "funny book". Daphne's life story Daphne du Maurier and Her Sisters: The Hidden Lives of Piffy been told many times, in her memoir and by biographers such as most authoritatively Margaret Forster, feminist critics Alison Light, Avril Horner and Sue Zlosnik, and novelists Sally Beauman and Justine Picardie. But this book's strength lies in its account of a trio of lives developing during a period of class and gender upheaval, and the sisters' response to social change. They should have been brothers. They would have made splendid boys. As a result, there has been excessive emphasis on the male du Maurier line, with most writers neglecting the forbidding figure of the sisters' mother Muriel, and her role in their emotional confusions, sexual experimentation, secret lives and traumas. Dunn's biography brings Muriel into the foreground, and suggests convincingly that Daphne's love of fantasy, her shyness and isolation "lay more at the door of her mother and the vacuum where her love should have been, than her father's possessive Muriel's favouritism for Jeanne, like Gerald's for Daphne, caused tensions between the sisters. All three went on to seek mother figures as friends and lovers. By interweaving these unorthodox sisters' lives, Dunn suggests how restrictive they found conventional gender roles. They fled cosmopolitan London for remote rural regions in order to find artistic independence and explore their sexuality and spirituality — with Angela becoming a High Anglican, Daphne du Maurier and Her Sisters: The Hidden Lives of Piffy a Catholic, Daphne an eclectic thinker Bird and Bing by animism and Jungian psychology. Dunn's biography is most original on the neglected figure of Angela. With all her family's financial support and a dazzling array of contacts, she lived a hectic life of foreign travel, parties and long holidays on aristocrats' estates. Gliding through circles of powerful and female-focused women including actresses Gwen Ffrangcon-Davies and Marda Vanne, Scottish laird of Torosay Olive Guthrie, and Fowey landowner Anne Treffry, she found that life was often more seductive than writing — though she always envied her sister's success. However, only three of Angela's books are available, reprinted by the Cornish press Truran. Herself one of six sisters, Dunn understands well the close support, secret language nicknames and euphemismsconflicts and cruelties between sisters who chose courageous creative paths away from the expectations of their family and class. If the biography is in some ways unevenly balanced, it is because Jeanne's estate and reputation have been carefully guarded. All the sisters destroyed letters and papers revealing sexual and other adventures, while Daphne's remarkable work and life still fascinate readers in ways that eclipse those of her siblings. Already have an account? Log in here. Independent Premium Comments can be posted by members of our membership scheme, Independent Premium. It allows our most engaged readers to debate the big issues, share their Bird and Bing experiences, discuss real-world solutions, and more. 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Dunn makes it clear that though Gerald made sure the whole household revolved around him, Daphne was able to hold her own. All three daughters escaped into a fantasy world of their own, inventing male personas for themselves. They would have made splendid boys. Sometimes these later egos slipped into the real world: the actor Roland Pertwee, staying with the Du Mauriers, was surprised to find Jeanne in his room, having folded his trousers and put toothpaste on his brush: "I'm Dampier and I'm your fag. Pretty well everything Daphne desired came to her: a series of bestselling novels, a nobly handsome war hero husband and, above all, a house, Menabilly in Cornwall, which Daphne du Maurier and Her Sisters: The Hidden Lives of Piffy obsessed and liberated her. But her relationship with reality was distant. The glory of Menabilly a house no one could see the point of but her was that living there, on that wild coast, was like living in a novel. Jeanne, too, dreamed true: a more modest dream of living as a painter, with a loyal partner at her side. Dunn is excellent on the lesbian s and Daphne du Maurier and Her Sisters: The Hidden Lives of Piffy in London, with delicious detail — Lena Ramsden, for example, insisted that the perfect present for young women she was courting was a trouser press. When she had loved women, as with her long first affair with the headmistress of her finishing school in Paris, it was not as herself, but as Eric Avon: "At 18 this half-breed fell in love, as a boy would do, with someone quite 12 years older than himself who was French and had all the understanding in the world and he loved her in every conceivable way up to the age of 23 or so. There is something faintly obscene about her detachment, as Dunn notes: "Fortified by the champagne and roses of life at Langley's End, Daphne could still watch a formation of 20 German bombers on their way to bomb Luton … and see the beauty of them rather than the deadly menace they embodied. As Daphne dominated the lives of her sisters, she dominates Dunn's pages. The problems of contrapuntal writing particular to group biography are not really solved; a paragraph about one sister just follows one about Daphne du Maurier and Her Sisters: The Hidden Lives of Piffy.