Daphne du Maurier's Cornish Cottage

The cottage was a haven for the writer amid the storms of life.

The cottage was originally built as a coach house and stables for the nearby waterfront Italianate mansion, Point Neptune. By the time she arrived at Readymoney in 1942 with her three children, du Maurier had already written Rebecca and Frenchman's Creek. But according to her biographer Margaret Forster, she arrived under something of a cloud. She had been staying with friends in a grand house in Hertfordshire while her husband, Lieutenant General Sir Frederick Browning, was away busy setting up Britain's first airborne division. Unfortunately, according to Forster, Du Maurier, was caught in an embrace with her hostess's husband. Du Maurier, then 34, wrote to a friend that "after many probings and thinkings" she was moving to Cornwall, where her mother and sisters were living and which had inspired her famous works, to "sort myself out". (Read entire article.)