Dame Daphne Du Maurier

Daphne du Maurier has become, in the popular imagination, indissolubly linked with Cornwall, an identification that is constantly being reinforced by the tourist industry. A visit to Jamaica Inn will offer the sight of a brass plaque in the floor of the bar to mark the place where Joss Merlyn died. The fact that he never lived except in du Maurier's imagination is conveniently ignored and the reality constructed by du Maurier's fiction creates, year by year for hundreds of thousands of profitable tourists, a narrative of Cornwall that relies little on historically verifiable fact.

Ironically, du Maurier was not an indigenous regional writer but a sophisticated metropolitan who, on seeing “Ferryside”, the house on the River Fowe