Britain's incredible landscapes were the inspiration for some of our greatest women writers.

From the Brontes' mysterious moors, to Beatrix Potter's idyllic Lake District, and the rolling chalk lands of Jane Austen's Hampshire.

I'm Mariella Frostrup, and my passion is books.

Now I want to uncover the stories behind some truly classic novels, and find out what made these great authors write the works they did.

From forgotten walks to mysterious coves, I'll be discovering the hidden secrets of these landscapes that motivated our best-loved female authors to create their masterpieces.

Oh, my goodness.

What have we got here?

There'll be big revelations as I find diaries, letters and new evidence that show what these regions really meant to these writers, and why their stories couldn't have come from anywhere else.

It's a journey that will reveal why our greatest novels weren't just written by their authors, but by the times and places they lived in.

Today, I'm exploring Cornwal to find out how its landscapes and industries inspired Daphne du Maurier.

As they drove down that hill, and looked at the harbour, she said, "This is for me."

Why a mysterious house and isolated bay helped her to create the bestseller, Rebecca.

When I first read Rebecca and I realised I knew some of the places that she wrote about it, it was mind-blowing.

And, how Bodmin Moor became the setting for her ultimate tale of bloodthirsty smugglers.

I just love landscapes like this because they embody the drama of the geology underneath our feet.

Rebecca, always Rebecca.

Wherever I walked in Manderley, wherever I sat, even in my thoughts and in my dreams, I met Rebecca.

Rebecca is du Maurier's most popular novel.

In it, the eponymous heroine is found dead on a shipwrecked boat long after she first disappeared.

It's a key moment in a tale of twists, turns and hidden secrets that nobody wants revealed.

The Cornwall conjured up in Rebecca is sinister and dangerous.

Very different from its reputation as a top holiday destination.

On my journey, I want to find out why du Maurier depicted its hundreds of miles of coastline and perfect beaches as a place of such foreboding.

Daphne du Maurier was born in 1907 in London, and was one of three sisters.

But she lived in Cornwall for over 60 years, where she wrote her masterpieces of Gothic suspense.

Novels like Rebecca sold more than three million copies in her lifetime, and along with The Birds and Jamaica Inn, became big screen hits that made her the toast of Hollywood.

Daphne du Maurier was often classed as a romantic novelist, but I think that undermines her skills, and it was certainly a description that she was resistant to.

Instead, I'd say she was a master storyteller.

Du Maurier used drama, intrigue and suspense to create these incredibly dark worlds that readers like me are still utterly immersed in.

Daphne du Maurier managed to come up with so many exciting plots and mysterious characters, so I want to uncover what Cornwall really meant to her, and why it remained her major inspiration throughout her life.

I'm starting my journey in Fowey, which Daphne du Maurier called home all her adult life.

Showing me why it so captivated du Maurier is historian and maritime expert Dr Helen Doe.

Daphne and the family wanted a second home.

One of the early second homers.

And they came down, they stopped by the car ferry, and that's when she saw the harbour.

And was that when she fell in love with the place?

Yes, absolutely.

We do know from her own words that, as they drove down that hill, and looked at the harbour, she said, "This is for me."

The du Mauriers were a renowned family in high society London.

Cornwall offered them a break from the public eye and they soon bought their second home here.

The following year, Daphne decided to stay, even though she was only 20.

What does it tell us about Daphne du Maurier that she felt such a passion for this place?

It was a completely different environment to the environment she'd had in London.

She could dress as she wanted.

She didn't have to dress up for anything.

She could go walking, she could go out fishing, and she'd go swimming in the coves - things that she could not do in London.

In the capital, du Maurier felt huge pressure to conform and become part of high society.

Cornwall was a release from all those restrictions.

I can show you two photographs that really highlight the difference.

Now, this first one is the way that Daphne's mother would like to see her.

You can see the neat hairstyle, pearls, the perfect young lady... Beautiful young lady.

Yes.

This is the way Daphne wanted to be.

Oh, my goodness, yes.

One of the pursuits she indulged in down here was she went conger eel hunting.

That's just fantastic, isn't it?

She looks great.

There's the harpoon, and there is the length of that conger eel.

Nasty!

So that's what Cornwall gave her, really.

The chance to be herself.

But it's only reading du Maurier's diary that you realise just how important it was to her to escape the confines of the capital.

"I am sick of my unhealthy lassitude, "which comes from yawning over a fire, "or breathing the stifling air in the Tube, "wearing tight hats and stupid shoes.

"I ought to be on the top of a cliff, "running and running."

For du Maurier, Cornwall was a place to break free.

Daphne du Maurier's new-found freedom also meant that her writing could truly take flight.

She completed a few short stories in her teens, but it was here in Cornwall that she first started to write in earnest.

Hello, John, how are you?

Very well.

You know the ropes now.Yeah, yeah.

Daphne found the inspiration for her first novel on her doorstep.

She wrote The Loving Spirit when she was just 22.

It charts the dramatic story of four generations of a shipbuilding family called the Coombes.

To show me just how closely the book reflects the history of Fowey, Helen is taking me to the house that the Du Maurier family bought here, Ferryside.

We go in to take a closer look at a ship's figurehead on the corner of the house.

It came from an abandoned ship that caught du Maurier's eye.

Tell me how it ended up stuck onto the du Mauriers' house.

When she found the ship, the figurehead was still on the ship.

Eventually, the ship was dismantled.

They said, "Well, you're so fond of it, would you like the figurehead?"

And so it was placed outside Ferryside.

If you look at where it is, it's actually just below the room where she wrote that novel.

What, so that window there?

So, that window that's open there, that's the room where she wrote The Loving Spirit.

The figurehead is a portrait of the matriarch of a real shipbuilding family that worked in Fowey.

She was called Jane Slade.

Her family history inspired du Maurier to write The Loving Spirit in which she renamed her Janet Coombe.

But Helen has a surprise for me because du Maurier isn't the only one with a strong connection to the Jane Slade figurehead.

In fact, the figurehead is my great-great-grandmother.

How amazing is that?

Not only am I seeing where du Maurier came up with her first work, but I'm sitting in a boat with a real life descendant of one of her characters.

And how do we know all of this?

I mean, how did you trace all of this?

My mother said to me, "A famous novelist has written a story about the family.

"Daphne du Maurier."

And then when I was 18, I decided to write to her, and she wrote back, and tells me that the real names were Christopher Slade, who married Jane Slade.

And that's Jane Slade, who's the figurehead.

My great-great-grandmother.

Yes, I'm going to have to let you into another big secret now.

What's that?

That's not the original figurehead.

That is actually a replica.

The original is still around, and it's safely inside Ferryside.

That is shocking.

In the loving spirit, the main character, Janet Coombe, is a Cornish woman who often wishes she'd been born a man so that she could sail the seas and live out her dreams of adventure on the rugged coastline.

"Though she was a woman and middle-aged, "she dreamt not of a warm fireside and an easy chair, "but of a lifting deck and a straining mast "grey seas beneath a windswept sky."

There's no question to me that Daphne du Maurier invested in Janet Coombes so much of the longing for freedom and for independence that she herself felt.

I can see why du Maurier experienced such a release here.

Today, the harbour is still a place where the promise of escape makes you feel alive.

It's such a beautiful ship.

It's fantastic to watch, isn't it?

That's over a century old.

And what's interesting now is to see that half the crew are female, and it does make you think about Daphne du Maurier and how much she desperately wanted to be that free soul - free to sail off and see the world, and be liberated from the constraints of life as a woman then.

If only she'd lived that bit longer, maybe she would have been able to realise her dream.

But the figurehead isn't the only thing that remains of the woman who inspired du Maurier's heroine in The Loving Spirit.

At nearby Lanteglos Church, Helen wants to show me more of her family's special history.

Oh, wow!

A history that du Maurier paid homage to.

My goodness.

"Christopher Slade, who died February 28th, 1870, "aged 60 years.

"Also of Jane Symons, his wife.

"Sweet rest at last."

Jane Symons when she got married and then became James Symons-Slade.

Daphne clearly knew this headstone.

And in the book, she quotes this "sweet rest at last".

She quoted it exactly.

Do we know if she actually looked like the figurehead?

No idea!

No idea.

Do people tell you that you look like the figurehead?

It has been known.

And I'm not sure whether I'm excited about that, or not!

The Loving Spirit was a moderate critical and commercial success, but one of the readers of the book was about to enter Daphne du Maurier's life in a way that even she, master storyteller that she was, couldn't have imagined.

Look at this church.

It's just beautiful.

Helen, tell me about Lieutenant General Frederick Arthur Montague Browning.

That's a wonderful long name, isn't it?It's so impressive!

He was a war hero in World War I. And how did he come into Daphne du Maurier's life?

Well, he read her book.

He read The Loving Spirit, and he saw it as a wonderful work of adventure, and he was a keen sailor.

He came into Fowey.

He gathered that the author was around, and through a mutual friend, asked to meet her.

And here she was, literally swept off her feet.

They very quickly got married, didn't they?Yes.

And the interesting thing is, you can see from that marriage certificate, they got married round about 100 years after Jane and Christopher Slade were married in this very church.

July 19th, 1932.

I'm surprised to discover just how intertwined du Maurier's life was with her first heroine.

Not only did they share a yearning for Cornish seas and adventures, but du Maurier married at the church where her heroine was married and buried.

I really wasn't expecting to find that.

For du Maurier, the real appeal of Cornwall seems to come from the danger and excitement from living in a rugged place like this and making your living from the sea, but smuggling was to come next, and in it she would paint an even darker picture of Cornish history.

That's Jamaica Inn.

The next part of my journy takes me to the wilderness of Bodmin Moor to find out how this very different Cornish landscape would inspire a world of treachery, murder and danger in du Maurier's mind.

I'm in Cornwall, discovering how its 400 miles of coastline and hidden coves inspired Daphne du Maurier to write her bestsellers, such as Rebecca and The Birds.

I've always particularly loved the sense of adventure and excitement in her writing.

And coming here, I can really sense why this place gave her the freedom to write that she never felt in London.

But now what I want to explore is why du Maurier was so drawn to portraying this county as a place of peril.

Du Maurier was fascinated by the difficulties and dangers of life in the past here in Cornwall, and in one of her darkest novel, Jamaica Inn, she enters the world of smuggling.

Jamaica Inn was inspired by a real life tavern here on Cornwall's Bodmin Moor.

In this dark, Gothic tale, the heroine discovers that her uncle leads a band of violent smugglers from this place.

But du Maurier's smugglers don't just bring in contraband.

They cause ships to crash so they can steal the cargo and murder the survivors.

A crime known as "wrecking".

So, I'm heading to Bodmin Moor to find out what it was about this setting that inspired Daphne to base such a gruesome, bloodthirsty novel here.

Apparently, Daphne du Maurier stayed over at the real life Jamaica Inn because she wanted to go riding out on Bodmin Moor with a friend.

The next day when they set off, this really, really thick mist descended and they found themselves completely lost.

In desperation, du Maurier and her friend let the horses free.

They followed them, hoping they would return to the inn.

Luckily, the plan worked, and that eerie journey through this inhospitable landscape made a lasting impression on du Maurier.

It must have been absolutely terrifying to be up here all alone, not knowing which way to turn, which way to go, and I'm sure it's that sense of jeopardy and the scariness of the location that seeped into du Maurier and was the reason that she set out to write Jamaica Inn.

Bodmin Moor gave du Maurier a classic Gothic ingredient - a dark but beautiful landscape that creates an atmosphere of mystery and fear.

Earth scientist, Dr Anjana Khatwa, is helping me understand why Bodmin looks the way it does and how it fuelled du Maurier's imagination.

About 300 million years ago, Cornwall was formed by two continents literally crashing into each other, and those tectonic forces, which are really brutal, actually, formed this landscape.

Deep underneath the Earth's crust at that time, there were molten plumes.

Those plumes would cool, and eventually form these great big batholiths of granite that dominate the Cornish landscape.

It's such a unique landscape, isn't it, with all these outcrops of granite everywhere?

I just love landscapes like this because they embody the drama of the geology underneath our feet.

Each year, thousands of tourists flock here to admire these huge granite tors that so inspired Daphne du Maurier.

In fact, Bodmin Moor is so incredible it's been designated an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty and a Site of Special Scientific Interest, due to the way it was formed.

Nowadays, its rough pasture is used mainly to raise livestock.

But, because it doesn't drain well, there were real dangers here for travellers in the time when Jamaica Inn is set.

Its bogs and mires were a deathtrap.

This whole area is covered in springs and watercourses running across a very waterlogged landscape.

And, although to the eye, you think, "Oh, it looks quite serene and quite stable", actually, one foot into that, you don't know how deep you're going to go.

It's just compacted sort of grass that that has no substance to it, so if you stand on it, you can disappear.

Yeah, I mean, you can.

I don't know if you want to try it now?

You probably don't want to.

I'd rather not try it, I'd rather you described it!

So the sense of peril isn't just imaginary because we're in a vast, desolate, you know, empty of humanity space.

There are actually things to be afraid of here.

Bodmin Moor has always been a place of myth and mystery.

Some even think a stretch of water here inspired the legend of King Arthur's sword Excalibur being thrown to the Lady of the Lake.

And, for someone like Daphne du Maurier, who loved mystery and intrigue, this was paradise.

I do you think that you find a place that nourishes your soul or inspires you, and it really feels like du Maurier here in Cornwall, with all the harshness and the barrenness of the landscape, actually found her place.

Inspired by its desolate setting, du Maurier decided to spend a few more nights at Jamaica Inn.

Here, she enjoyed soaking up tales of this old coaching inn as a haunt for smugglers.

Cornwall has a rich history of smuggling, partly due to its many hidden coves.

These secret landing points, connected by lanes hidden in the trees, enabled smugglers to secretly avoid the ports and bring goods ashore to sell tax-free.

But, what I want to find out now is how realistic du Maurier's depiction of Cornwall's smugglers actually was.

Did wrecking really take place like in Jamaica Inn, when du Maurier's smugglers use lights to lure ships onto the rocks to steal their cargo?

I'm heading back to the coast to find some answers.

Starting with the opinion of local skipper John Barker.

There's all kinds of stories that swirl around about smuggling and piracy.

Go back a couple of hundred years and there were that many shipwrecks because the navigation aids were non-existent, and the charts were...not as good as they could be, shall we say?

I mean, it is a perfect coastline, isn't it, for secrets?

It is.

It's full of them.

There was a tunnel where ships used to come in and pass booty ashore.

What's your theory on the wreckers?

Do you think they existed, or not?

Oh, they definitely existed.

Yeah, definitely.

When the ships come ashore, most of the people down taking the stuff off the boats were the women, believe it or not.

What, are you trying to sully the reputation of women, saying that we were the worst wreckers of all?

No, but you were involved!

So it seems that some locals do believe du Maurier's depiction of smugglers using lanterns to deliberately lure ships onto rocks.

But I'm meeting up with historian and literary expert Dr Kate Montague to get her take.

So I have here ye olde lantern, though, obviously battery-powered these days, and I figure I'll just put it down here, and hopefully we'll get a trophy ship come in and we'll lure something or someone in!

I'm thinking maybe something French with a lot of Bordeaux on board!

But, of course, that's what Daphne du Maurier describes in Jamaica Inn.

Is that a realistic scenario, do you think?

I think this is where her Gothic imagination really takes flight.

A lot of these stories about false lights being used to lure ships ashore circulated around Cornwall.

She would have been privy to these myths and stories, but there's not a lot of historical truth or veracity to these myths.

So, are you telling me it's not true?

Because I think it's a really good idea!

I mean, they think it's a light, don't they?

They think it's like a lighthouse, or someone beckoning them in.

And then, all of a sudden, they find that they're just full of marauding Cornwallians after their booty!

And it was something that she used to incredible effect.

I think that's what Jamaica Inn does - it embellishes reality through violence and brutality.

I think this is how she actually understands these smuggling rackets that did populate the coast here.

To me, it seems that du Maurier's depiction of merciless ship breaking was so vivid that it stuck in the popular imagination to become a part of Cornwall's history.

What I really love about this is that it shows the true power of masterly writing and a cracking tale.

And I don't think du Maurier could have done this anywhere else.

How much were her novels only possible because she found herself here in Cornwall?

Jamaica Inn wouldn't exist without her visiting Bodmin Moor.

Her Gothic imagination has a real sensitivity to darkness, to the macabre, to violence.

She seeks it out in the places that she's inhabiting.

So, although du Maurier researched real places and people for her novels, she loved the drama and mystery of Cornwall so much that her imagination ran riot.

She produced her own dramatic version of this county - one that still fascinates me and millions of readers around the world.

I'm going to pick up my lamp because you're saying that I haven't got a chance in hell of getting my nice Bordeaux crashing on the rocks.

Come on, let's head back.

Oh, what a beautiful night.

It seems increasingly clear that what attracted Daphne du Maurier to Cornwall was a real sense of the excitement of living cheek by jowl with the perils of nature.

Whether it was getting lost in the vast expanses of Bodmin Moor, or sailing the deep waters of the Cornish coastline, this was a place that made her feel very much alive.

But du Maurier was about to write her most successful novel ever.

The tragic love tale, Rebecca.

And that would be inspired by hidden places she uncovered here in Cornwall.

But the true locations that lie behind this novel are still being revealed, and I'm about to find them.

I've always been a big fan of Daphne du Maurier and her gripping novels like Jamaica Inn and The Birds.

To me, there are few authors who match her sheer skill for great storytelling.

So I'm in Cornwall, finding out why this county played such a big role in creating her bestsellers.

In 1936, ten years after moving here, du Maurier's husband got a military posting to Egypt.

Daphne accompanied him, but she felt homesick out there, and in her imagination, she found a way to return, writing her landmark novel, Rebecca.

"Last night, I dreamt I went to Manderley again."

Thus began du Maurier's most famous, most enduring, and perhaps most haunting novel, Rebecca.

It hasn't been out of print in the 80 years since it was first written.

Rebecca is a murder-mystery.

When her body is discovered in a sunken boat, the question is, how did she die?

Most of the action takes place in and around a mysterious mansion called Manderley, believed to be based on a real home here.

I want to find out why the book was so successful, and also more about the house and the setting here in Cornwall, and how it inspired du Maurier.

Helping me try and locate the places that lie behind Rebecca is historian Lynne Gould.

Lynn regularly leads walks to du Maurier's favourite haunts.

And if you see, there's a rocky outcrop there...Yeah...in the sea.

Lynn believes that if you retrace du Maurier's footsteps through the landscape that inspired her, you can gain a unique insight into the workings of her creative imagination, and particularly with Rebecca.

When I first read Rebecca and I realised I knew some of the places that she wrote about, it was mind-blowing.

You know, it was amazing.

I'm thinking, "Gosh, this is where she brought her characters", and it was just lovely taking other people to those sort of areas, to show them what she wrote about.

First, I want to find out about Manderley.

In the novel, it's an eerie mansion on the coast, where much of Rebecca takes place.

It's believed the inspiration was Menabilly, a real house near Fowey that fascinated du Maurier.

It's hidden from view from land and sea, and even today, its owners maintain its mystery by never allowing cameras in.

So, would it have been on a pathway like this that Daphne de Maurier would have first caught a glimpse of Menabilly?

She trespassed on the estate.

She wanted to go and see Menabilly, and she talks about going through the woods on her stomach and finding this wonderful house.

She called it her elusive house of secrets.

You know, she was passionate about it.I love it!

She's clearly a total adventurer, to go crawling on her stomach, but it is a wonderful example of how kind of intrepid and free and wild she was.

What do you think it represented to her?

I think she was really captivated by the house itself, and she wanted to know more about it.

There was nobody living there at the time when she discovered it.

She wanted to know all the secrets that it held because it was an old house.

Exploring the woods like this, I can see why a mysterious house, hidden from view, intrigued du Maurier so much that she started thinking of what things could go on there.

And that was how Rebecca was born.

But du Maurier became so intrigued by Menabilly that she wanted to make it her home one day.

So much of that book centres around this house that, to that point, she still hadn't lived in.

She spent several years asking if she could rent it, and it was only in 1942 when she came back to this country and she was told that it might be worth asking for a lease again.

And so that's what she did, and she got a lease.

It's an exciting feeling, to be literally following the mind's eye of du Maurier, but the house was only one of the locations that would eventually turn into writing material for Rebecca.

Lynn is taking me to the coves and bays on its estate, where key scenes in the novel take place.

Wow, look at this.

So, would this be the beach below Menabilly then?

Yes.

Menabilly is up in the woodlands up there.

And, adding a bit of Gothic atmosphere today is plenty of good old Cornish drizzle.

Spitting again.

You really do have quite a few seasons in one day.

In Rebecca, a sunken boat with Rebecca's body is found in a cove just below Manderley.

It turns out she was murdered in a nearby boathouse.

The beach where I am now has long been a site of pilgrimage for fans seeking out the setting for Rebecca's death.

Now, we've always believed, and I think everybody felt, that this was the setting for the boathouse, and you see there's a house just across the other side of the lake.

That was a cottage, or two cottages, in the 1930s, when Daphne would have first visited here.

And this is where a lot of du Maurier's fans come to visit, isn't it, because of the fact that it's the setting for that extraordinary scene?

But Lynn has sensational news.

She thinks that for years now, people may have been coming to the wrong cove, and researching the true scene of the fictitious crime could give us a unique insight into Daphne du Maurier's creative process.

Some friends of mine made a wonderful discovery, that there's another boathouse in this area, but not in this cove.

Seriously?

So this isn't actually the cove where she imagined that murder occurring?

It's actually somewhere near here?

It is very close by.

In fact, this is all Polridmouth Bay, and I think there was a boathouse on the other side of this cove.

In the novel, the boathouse is discovered by the heroine when her dog runs away over a barrier of rocks sticking into the sea.

When she follows it, she finds herself in a hidden cove.

Although there is no second cove that's completely hidden here, there is a rock promontory that divides the bay in two, and Lyn thinks this gave Du Maurier the idea for the concealed cove, and she has a map that she believes proves it.

And I can show you... On Lynn's map from 1908, you can see the rocky promontory, but, excitingly to the left of it, there seems to be the location of a now demolished boathouse.

And that's where we're going.

OK.All right?

We follow a path above the rocks.

We can only get there during low tide, I guess.That's right.

If you're climbing across the rocks.

It makes total sense to me, that a master of mystery like du Maurier would be captivated by a secret cove, rather than one in plain sight.

We're now standing right where Rebecca's famous boathouse used to be.

It was just along here behind us, a long, thin boathouse, with a slipway coming out down here.

What's the evidence that this would have been here in du Maurier's Day?

We found a postcard from 1914.

And, when you enlarge it, you can just see the remains of a boathouse on it.

We haven't actually pinned it down to whether that was here when Daphne was here.

But, don't forget, she was fantastic at historical research, and so she would have looked at what was here at the time.

So even if she never saw it, she would have known that, over those jagged rocks... Yes...and a little short walk across the beach lay what was once a boathouse with a slipway, and that would have played in her imagination, like so much else around this coastline.

That's right.

And it's not just the former boathouse that makes Lynn confident that this is Rebecca's secret bay.

A tragedy in du Maurier's lifetime may have given her the idea for Rebecca's watery tomb being uncovered here.

There was a shipwreck here in the 1930s, and Daphne came with the people from Fowey, and they lined the cliffs and watched it happening here, and the remnants are just over here behind us.

At very low tide, you can see bits of it.

So even the shipwreck would have played into the whole of that story.Yes.

I'm thrilled to see the real locations that inspired one of my favourite novels because it shows that du Maurier was instinctively drawn to places that suggested concealed secrets and mysteries.

But now I want to know where this affinity with hidden truths came from.

Some experts believe it stemmed from the fact that du Maurier had many secrets of her own.

One was that she believed she had a male alter ego that inspired her creativity.

She named him "the boy in the box" as she kept him hidden from sight.

I'm at Jamaica Inn's Daphne du Maurier Museum with biographer Jane Dunn, to find out more about this secret force in du Maurier's life.

She talks about her male side in some of her letters and things, doesn't she?

What's she referring to there?

I think that she always felt that the boy in life had much more fun, had much more freedom, had much more adventure, and she sees herself as the boy hero.

Daphne was always Peter Pan, the adventurous boy, who would be casting his cloak in front of the woman he loved, so that she'd save her shoes from the mud.

And that boy lives on inside her, and is her creative self, and she shuts it away.

She moves down to Cornwall.

She finds a place where she can do all the things she loves.

She can fish for conger eels and row boats, and wear trousers all the time.Mm.

And, you know, you say she sort of locks this male alter ego away, but is part of the fact that she attributes her creativity to this male part of her character the fact that women weren't really allowed to express themselves creatively at that time - it still wasn't the thing to do?

Certainly.

Her family, when this was a whole time for women's suffrage and everything else, they weren't interested.

They just did not get involved.

It's really quite interesting how insular they were.

It seems to me that du Maurier saw herself mirrored in the Cornish landscape, with its hidden coves and deep waters.

Like so many of her characters, she was full of secrets.

With Rebecca, du Maurier wasn't just writing about the Cornwall that she loved so much.

She was also exploring her own identity and personality.

She put so much of herself in the novel.

A year after the book came out, Cornwall was to change irrevocably.

The outbreak of war brought an end to peace and tranquillity, but du Maurier was to use it as inspiration for her next blockbuster, The Birds.

What happened here to du Maurier that gave her the idea to write about killer flocks of birds?

That's what I'm about to find out.

I'm in Cornwall, one of my favourite counties, to find out why this area captivated the best selling novelist, Daphne du Maurier, and helped her create her own brand of Gothic thriller.

I'm discovering for myself the sense of freedom she found here in Cornwall, with all its incredible cliffs and countless beaches.

But now I want to look at the later parts of her writing career, when it became clear that Cornwall and her life here would never be the same again.

Shortly after her most popular novel, Rebecca, was published, Cornwell was to change dramatically, and du Maurier would use this for her inspiration for perhaps her most striking and terrifying tale to date, The Birds.

This is a horror story in which the Cornish community is attacked by flocks of bloodthirsty birds.

By the end, the whole of Britain is under attack.

It's such a scary tale, Hitchcock turned it into a hugely successful film.

But I want to find out why the idea of killer birds is thought to have been inspired by du Maurier's experience here in Cornwall, in World War II.

Maritime historian Helen Doe is taking me on another tour of the harbour to try and find the answer.

What I didn't realise was that this was a place that was actually a target during the war.

I mean, the war was very real here - it was visceral.

When Daphne was here during the war, the whole harbour was one of the key embarkation points for D-Day.

The thing about Cornwall is it's always been on the front line, which is why there are several medieval fortifications here, and at the harbour mouth, there was a great barrier across.

Also, there were mines put here, so you couldn't easily go in or out.

So this would have been almost as much a target, I suppose, as somewhere like London.

I mean, you would really be living in the war here.Yes.

So, what would we have had in this bay?

What sort of armaments?

They were using previous fortifications.

And so we've got here St Catharine's Castle, and here they had a very significant gun emplacement there - really handily right on the cliffs.

There are fortifications all the way up, guarding the whole harbour.

Fowey seems to have successfully prevented attack from the sea, but it was the attacks that did get through that triggered du Maurier's imagination.

We look at the sky now and we think, "Oh, beautiful sky!"

The sky would have been a place of threat then, wouldn't it?

Yes.

There were bombs dropped on Fowey and Polruan.

In 1940, the school in Polruan was totally wiped out.

Luckily, they'd closed the school.

The caretaker had just left, and that same bomber then unloaded several other bombs.

Another time, one Luftwaffe pilot came in and strafed all the way down Fore Street in Fowey.

So, yes, there was peril, certainly.

It must have been a threatening time, and I'm really struck by the fact that out of that period, what Daphne du Maurier wrote was The Birds, which is this terrifying story - probably her most masterful writing, the way that it conjures menace.

And so much perhaps inspired by what was happening here during the war.

I can really understand why du Maurier would have been so affected by seeing her hometown under attack.

It must have been terrifying.

But, how did bombers here translate into vicious seagulls in her mind?

Helping me understand Daphne du Maurier's creative process is Dr Helen Hansen.

So, how literal can we be in terms of connecting The Birds to what was happening around Daphne du Maurier, when she was in Fowey in that latter part of the war?

I think she definitely hooks some of the aspects of the story to the context.

We know that there was widescale bombing in Plymouth, in Exeter and Bristol, the major cities in the southwest, and also, closest to home in Fowey.

And there was a terrible story, wasn't there, from Plymouth during the war of, I think, 72 or 76 people killed in an air raid shelter.

I mean, that's a story that du Maurier would have been well aware of.Yes.

And I think she would have connected, you know... She was connecting to the hopelessness and helplessness of people, and I think she really captures that very vividly in The Birds.

What's brilliant about her writing is she doesn't just chronicle it, does she?

She takes it from a completely different place, and kind of nips away at those themes, those undercurrents, but doesn't actually ever kind of go, "This is the war.

We're afraid of things flying in the air..." No.

I mean, she'll plant the seed and then she'll let it sort of grow in your mind.

SCREECHING I think it's very impressive, how du Maurier's tale of nature turned on its head conveys the trauma of war coming to Cornwall.

But this global conflict wouldn't just change du Maurier's hometown forever.

It would have a lasting impact on her marriage.

In fact, her life here would never be the same again.

Her husband, nicknamed Boy, was a high ranking officer during a disastrous military campaign at Arnhem.

Later in the film A Bridge Too Far, he was directly blamed for the huge Allied losses.

I'm back at Jamaica Inn's du Maurier museum with biographer Jane Dunn, to find out why this had an impact on Daphne and her writing career.

He was in charge of the 1st Airborne Division, and the holding of the bridge at Arnhem did not happen and there were great casualties.

It was a tragic end to a very, very ambitious campaign, which is what this letter from Prince Philip refers to.

He's written it on her 70th birthday and he says, "Dear Daphne, I've just heard about Boy's shabby treatment "in the film A Bridge Too Far.

"It's really monstrous, the way film-makers rewrite history "just for the sake of entertainment."

He's writing to a novelist, who's spent her whole time writing something... Yes, rewriting everything!

And of course, this this was this incredibly successful film, and the responsibility for the failure at Arnhem was put pretty firmly on his shoulders.

The trauma of her husband's wartime experiences was one of several factors that meant the du Mauriers grew further apart, with Daphne spending more and more time on her own in Cornwall, and this seems to have had a big impact on the type of books she wrote in her later years.

Du Maurier's troubled marriage was as complex as that of any of her characters, but one thing remained constant - her love of Cornwall.

After her husband's death in 1965, she started writing more non-fiction, including Enchanted Cornwall, which was to be one of her last books, published in 1989.

In it, she reveals how her favourite places shaped her work, saying, "they whispered their secrets" and the secrets turned into stories.

Du Maurier died the same year, aged 81.

Her ashes were scattered here, on the cliffs and coves that she loved.

She left behind a legacy of nearly 40 books, which Hollywood still makes into blockbusters today.

Most of us see Cornwall as a place of peace and beauty.

But, for du Maurier, it was more than that.

It was a place to explore her complex character and her desire to escape the traditional female role model of the day.

She saw Cornwall differently, as a place of danger and peril, whether shipwrecks or smugglers or attacking seagulls, and it was this dark fascination that gave us these great, sinister tales that are still bestsellers today.

Subtitles by Red Bee Media