Frenchman's Creek

Frenchman’s Creek Review

Daphne du Maurier wrote Frenchman’s Creek in 1941, during the London Blitz, and the circumstances of composition are not incidental to the novel. It is a fantasy of escape — specifically, the escape of a woman trapped by the expectations of her class and her marriage — written at a moment when London was being bombed nightly and the idea of escape, of a hidden creek and a pirate ship and a love affair unconstrained by convention, had an urgency it might not otherwise have possessed. Du Maurier understood what she was writing and made no apology for it: this is romance and adventure as conscious wish-fulfilment, and it is entirely accomplished on those terms.

Dona St Columb, a bored aristocrat married to a pleasant, ineffectual man, escapes the social round of Restoration London for Navron, the family estate in Cornwall, with her children and a skeleton staff. In the creek below the house she discovers a French pirate vessel and meets its captain — urbane, courageous, an artist who paints birds, a man who has apparently chosen the freedom of piracy over the constraints of any settled life. The affair that develops between them is rendered with the directness that du Maurier’s best romantic writing always had: she does not sentimentalise it or pretend its costs are small.

What elevates the novel above conventional historical romance is du Maurier’s honesty about what her protagonist wants and why. Dona does not simply want the French captain; she wants what he represents — the freedom to act rather than to be acted upon, to make choices that are genuinely her own rather than choices made within the narrow band that her class and gender permit. Cornwall, for du Maurier, is always the landscape where different rules apply: the moors and the coast are spaces where the civilised world’s categories temporarily dissolve, where a woman can shoot a pistol and sail a boat and choose a lover without the weight of London society pressing down on every decision.

The ending is honest rather than romantic in the escapist sense: du Maurier does not pretend that the fantasy is sustainable or that its costs are zero. Dona returns to her husband and children having had her summer of freedom, and the novel’s final pages acknowledge both what she is returning to and what she is choosing not to relinquish entirely. It is a more sophisticated treatment of the romance fantasy than its apparent lightness suggests — a novel that understands it is offering a dream and is honest enough to show the dreamer waking up.

Cornwall as Freedom

Du Maurier’s Cornwall is always the landscape where different rules apply — where the claims of London society temporarily dissolve and something older and less governed comes to the surface. In Frenchman’s Creek this function is most explicit: the hidden creek, accessible only by those who know the tidal channels, is a space outside the normal order of seventeenth-century English aristocratic life. Dona’s discovery of the pirate ship in the creek is not merely a plot event but the novel’s central symbol — a hidden freedom that has always been there, accessible to those willing to look.

The Cornish landscape du Maurier renders here — the wooded creeks of the Helford estuary, the tidal channels, the oak trees reaching down to the water — is drawn from her intimate knowledge of the area around Menabilly, the house on the Fowey estuary that she had leased and that became the model for Manderley in Rebecca. Du Maurier moved to Cornwall in her twenties and remained attached to it for the rest of her life; her rendering of the landscape has the authority of someone who had walked every path.

The Pirate Captain as Mirror

The French captain, Jean-Benoit Aubéry, is less a full character than a projection of everything Dona wants and cannot have within the limits of her actual life: a man who has chosen freedom over security, whose courage is not the formal courage of the court but practical and self-directed, who paints birds with an artist’s attention. He is idealised in ways that Dona’s husband Harry is not, and the novel is self-aware about this asymmetry — du Maurier does not pretend that the fantasy object and the real man are the same thing.

What the novel is genuinely interested in, beneath its adventure surface, is the structure of the fantasy itself: why does a woman of intelligence and spirit need to project her desire for freedom onto a pirate captain rather than finding it in her own life? The answer — that the seventeenth century offers her no legitimate path to the kind of freedom she wants — is embedded in the novel’s historical setting, and it gives the romance an undercurrent of social analysis that lifts it above its genre.

Our rating: 4.0/5 — Du Maurier’s most explicitly romantic novel is also her most direct treatment of female desire for escape from the constraints of class and marriage — written during the Blitz as a conscious fantasy of freedom, and entirely successful on those terms.

Restoration Escape

Frenchman’s Creek (1941) is du Maurier’s most frankly romantic novel: Dona St. Columb, suffocated by the corruption of Restoration London, flees to the family estate on the Cornish coast and falls in with a French pirate who anchors his ship in a hidden creek. The book turns the cove and the tides into a fantasy of escape from the cage of aristocratic womanhood.