The Loving Spirit – Daphne du Maurier (1931)

My first read for this year’s #DDMreadingweek was The Loving Spirit – Daphne du Maurier’s first novel. It’s an impressive debut – revealing her talent for weaving compelling stories together with her love for Cornwall.

The Loving Spirit is the story of a family across a period of about one hundred years. The family are the Coombes a family of boat-builders in Plyn a small coastal town in Cornwall. The boat yards and harbour of Plyn are a hive of activity in the early nineteenth century – it’s a place that du Maurier brings breathtakingly to life, place being so important in her writing.

The novel starts on the day that Janet Coombe marries her cousin Thomas. Janet had grown up with a fierce love of the sea, an untamed spirit that made her long for the kind of sea-faring adventures only reserved for men. She has always longed for the freedom of the sea, and spends many hours gazing out across the sea from the cliffs, dreaming of what it might feel like to sail off to new places, at one with the ocean.

“Now the mist had lifted, and Plyn was no longer a place of shadows. Voices rose from the harbour, the gulls dived in the water, and folk stood at their cottage doors.

Janet stood still on the hilltop and watched the sea, and it seemed that there were two sides of her; one that wanted to be the wife of a man, and to care for him and love him tenderly, and one that asked only to be part of a ship, part of the seas and the sky above, with the glad free ways of a gull.

Then she turned and saw Thomas coming up the hill towards her. She smiled and ran to him.”

Janet knows that can’t be her life, she puts aside her dreams and settles down to marry Thomas, a good kind man, a boat-builder who she loves and looks forward to sharing her life with. They move into an ivy-clad house standing away by itself – here Janet and Thomas raise their family. Thomas makes his living in the Coombe boat yard, a proud craftsman, looking forward to passing on his skills to his sons.

Janet has a deep love for her family, but that restless spirit remains a part of her, a yearning always for the waves. It’s this spirit that will be passed down through her children to her descendants.

“She gave to both Thomas and Samuel her natural spontaneity of feeling and a great simplicity of heart; but the spirit of Janet was free and unfettered, waiting to rise from its self-enforced seclusion to mingle with intangible things, like the wind, the sea, and the skies, hand in hand with the one for whom she waited. Then she, too, would become part of these things forever, abstract and immortal.”

Janet and Thomas have six children four boys and two girls. The eldest, Samuel will follow his father into the boatyard. Mary will stay at home, caring for her parents and later helping to care for the children of her siblings. Joseph is the third child born, a boy who looks like his mother and inherits that wild restless spirit, and yearning for the sea. Joseph’s wildness gets him into trouble time and again as he is growing up, only his mother can really calm him, only she really understands him, theirs is a unique bond. Joseph’s love for his mother is unsurpassed – he carries her with him always. From the time he is a little boy Joseph knows he will be a sailor. Younger brother Herbert will also, in time follow Thomas and Samuel into the Coombe boat yard. The youngest daughter will become a farmer’s wife, her husband a man that will show great friendship to Joseph and his children as the years pass. Philip on the other hand, is entirely different to the rest of the Coombe siblings. Philip has no interest in boatbuilding or sailing, he grows up to be a bitter, resentful man. He becomes clerk to a local shipbroking firm, intent on being a gentleman, he eventually rises to become the head of the company and a wealthy man by Plyn standards. His spite, and jealousy however will have a long and terrible reach.

A ship is built in the Coombe boat yard, built by Thomas and his sons – a ship that will be named the Janet Coombe, a ship which will be skippered by Joseph, taking goods from Cornwall all around the world.

As with so many Daphne du Maurier novels there is a lot that I can’t say for fear of spoiling it for others. What she does so well though, is to create a family, four generations are explored, their hopes, dreams, weaknesses, highs, and lows. The stories of the individual characters weave together across the decades, telling a story of the sea, boat building, family, and Cornwall.

The story follows Joseph, a renowned figure in Plyn, through the years of his tumultuous life. Joseph’s first love is the sea, but he marries twice and has four children.  His eldest son Christopher is the focus of the next generation and his fear for the sea and sea-faring will put him at odds with the father who loves him. The novel ends with Christopher’s daughter Jennifer at the end of the 1920s.

This is a wonderfully immersive novel, an escape that the reader really can’t help but be swept up by.