It is this story about the relationship between imagination and fantasy.

That’s why she calls the biography the ‘infernal world’ of Branwell Brontë, (1960) borrowing a phrase from Charlotte-he was completely taken over by this imaginative life and it ruined him. In the preface to her biography, du Maurier says the trouble with Branwell is that he couldn’t distinguish reality from fantasy. According to Oxford University’s Laura Varnam: It was from the article at Five Books, that I realised that the characterisation of Robert-Mathurin Busson du Maurier in The Glass-Blowers owed something to Du Maurier’s biography, The Infernal World of Branwell Brontë, published just three years earlier in 1960. For a convincing article about the belated recognition of Du Maurier’s place in the pantheon of English writers, see this article at Five Books. Daphne du Maurier's name is a certificate for a substantial sale the ultimate result may well be below her peak.I chose to read The Glass-Blowers (1963) because it’s the saga of an 18th century family in France during the Revolution, and it’s a persuasive refutation of the idea that Du Maurier was ‘just’ a romance novelist. Violence, tragedy, high drama- all are here, but one never loses the awareness that the novelist is, perhaps, hampered by the historian and biographer in the telling. The plot thread is thin, despite its multiple factors and characters but the setting provides as lively and vivid and original a picture of rural France under the Terror, as this reader has chanced to encounter. And she tells the story as a principal in the drama, Sophie Duval, tells the story of Robert, her errant brother, for the English-born nephew, his son. She dedicates her book ''To my forebears'' the master glass-blowers of La Brulonnerie, Cherigny, La Pierre and the Chesne-Bidault''.

Now comes another panel in the family history, done in fictional form, The Glass Blower, a story that reaches back to France of the Revolution and England as seen through the experiences of one du Maurier ancestor, a refugee, and pretty much of a blot on the scutcheon, but a colorful figure in spite of his questionable ethical principles. In 1954 Daphne du Maurier built a novel entitled Mary Anne around her great-great-grandmother earlier she had written two unforgettable biographies, one of her father Gerald, the other titled simply The du Mauriers.

The glass blowers du maurier