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The Years Between
Set against the backdrop of the Second World War, The Years Between unfolds in the library/living room of an English country house. The man of the house, Colonel Michael Wentworth, MP, is presumed dead after his plane crashed into the sea on a flight to Europe in 1942.
His wife Diana is persuaded to take over the Colonel's parliamentary seat, and she is supported in her endeavours by her neighbour Richard Llewellyn, a sympathetic farmer with whom she strikes up a romantic relationship. Llewellyn teaches the Wentworths' young son Robin how to fish, thus becoming his great friend.
Three years later, as the war is about to come to an end, the Colonel returns. He has been playing a key role in organizing the resistance movement in Occupied Europe, and his disappearance and death were staged by the authorities to provide convincing cover for his activities. The remainder of the play deals with the fallout of Michael's return on the various protagonists.
His wife Diana is persuaded to take over the Colonel's parliamentary seat, and she is supported in her endeavours by her neighbour Richard Llewellyn, a sympathetic farmer with whom she strikes up a romantic relationship. Llewellyn teaches the Wentworths' young son Robin how to fish, thus becoming his great friend.
Three years later, as the war is about to come to an end, the Colonel returns. He has been playing a key role in organizing the resistance movement in Occupied Europe, and his disappearance and death were staged by the authorities to provide convincing cover for his activities. The remainder of the play deals with the fallout of Michael's return on the various protagonists.
79 pages, Unknown Binding
First published January 1, 1946
About the author
Daphne du Maurier
434 books10.4k followersDaphne du Maurier was born on 13 May 1907 at 24 Cumberland Terrace, Regent's Park, London, the middle of three daughters of prominent actor-manager Sir Gerald du Maurier and actress Muriel, née Beaumont. In many ways her life resembles a fairy tale. Born into a family with a rich artistic and historical background, her paternal grandfather was author and Punch cartoonist George du Maurier, who created the character of Svengali in the 1894 novel Trilby, and her mother was a maternal niece of journalist, author, and lecturer Comyns Beaumont. She and her sisters were indulged as a children and grew up enjoying enormous freedom from financial and parental restraint. Her elder sister, Angela du Maurier, also became a writer, and her younger sister Jeanne was a painter.
She spent her youth sailing boats, travelling on the Continent with friends, and writing stories. Her family connections helped her establish her literary career, and she published some of her early work in Beaumont's Bystander magazine. A prestigious publishing house accepted her first novel when she was in her early twenties, and its publication brought her not only fame but the attentions of a handsome soldier, Major (later Lieutenant-General Sir) Frederick Browning, whom she married.
She continued writing under her maiden name, and her subsequent novels became bestsellers, earning her enormous wealth and fame. Many have been successfully adapted into films, including the novels Rebecca, Frenchman's Creek, My Cousin Rachel, and Jamaica Inn, and the short stories The Birds and Don't Look Now/Not After Midnight. While Alfred Hitchcock's films based upon her novels proceeded to make her one of the best-known authors in the world, she enjoyed the life of a fairy princess in a mansion in Cornwall called Menabilly, which served as the model for Manderley in Rebecca.
Daphne du Maurier was obsessed with the past. She intensively researched the lives of Francis and Anthony Bacon, the history of Cornwall, the Regency period, and nineteenth-century France and England. Above all, however, she was obsessed with her own family history, which she chronicled in Gerald: A Portrait, a biography of her father; The du Mauriers, a study of her family which focused on her grandfather, George du Maurier, the novelist and illustrator for Punch; The Glassblowers, a novel based upon the lives of her du Maurier ancestors; and Growing Pains, an autobiography that ignores nearly 50 years of her life in favour of the joyful and more romantic period of her youth. Daphne du Maurier can best be understood in terms of her remarkable and paradoxical family, the ghosts which haunted her life and fiction.
While contemporary writers were dealing critically with such subjects as the war, alienation, religion, poverty, Marxism, psychology and art, and experimenting with new techniques such as the stream of consciousness, du Maurier produced 'old-fashioned' novels with straightforward narratives that appealed to a popular audience's love of fantasy, adventure, sexuality and mystery. At an early age, she recognised that her readership was comprised principally of women, and she cultivated their loyal following through several decades by embodying their desires and dreams in her novels and short stories.
In some of her novels, however, she went beyond the technique of the formulaic romance to achieve a powerful psychological realism reflecting her intense feelings about her father, and to a lesser degree, her mother. This vision, which underlies Julius, Rebecca and The Parasites, is that of an author overwhelmed by the memory of her father's commanding presence. In Julius and The Parasites, for example, she introduces the image of a domineering but deadly father and the daring subject of incest.
In Rebecca, on the other hand, du Maurier fuses psychological realism with a sophisticated version of the Cinderella story.
She spent her youth sailing boats, travelling on the Continent with friends, and writing stories. Her family connections helped her establish her literary career, and she published some of her early work in Beaumont's Bystander magazine. A prestigious publishing house accepted her first novel when she was in her early twenties, and its publication brought her not only fame but the attentions of a handsome soldier, Major (later Lieutenant-General Sir) Frederick Browning, whom she married.
She continued writing under her maiden name, and her subsequent novels became bestsellers, earning her enormous wealth and fame. Many have been successfully adapted into films, including the novels Rebecca, Frenchman's Creek, My Cousin Rachel, and Jamaica Inn, and the short stories The Birds and Don't Look Now/Not After Midnight. While Alfred Hitchcock's films based upon her novels proceeded to make her one of the best-known authors in the world, she enjoyed the life of a fairy princess in a mansion in Cornwall called Menabilly, which served as the model for Manderley in Rebecca.
Daphne du Maurier was obsessed with the past. She intensively researched the lives of Francis and Anthony Bacon, the history of Cornwall, the Regency period, and nineteenth-century France and England. Above all, however, she was obsessed with her own family history, which she chronicled in Gerald: A Portrait, a biography of her father; The du Mauriers, a study of her family which focused on her grandfather, George du Maurier, the novelist and illustrator for Punch; The Glassblowers, a novel based upon the lives of her du Maurier ancestors; and Growing Pains, an autobiography that ignores nearly 50 years of her life in favour of the joyful and more romantic period of her youth. Daphne du Maurier can best be understood in terms of her remarkable and paradoxical family, the ghosts which haunted her life and fiction.
While contemporary writers were dealing critically with such subjects as the war, alienation, religion, poverty, Marxism, psychology and art, and experimenting with new techniques such as the stream of consciousness, du Maurier produced 'old-fashioned' novels with straightforward narratives that appealed to a popular audience's love of fantasy, adventure, sexuality and mystery. At an early age, she recognised that her readership was comprised principally of women, and she cultivated their loyal following through several decades by embodying their desires and dreams in her novels and short stories.
In some of her novels, however, she went beyond the technique of the formulaic romance to achieve a powerful psychological realism reflecting her intense feelings about her father, and to a lesser degree, her mother. This vision, which underlies Julius, Rebecca and The Parasites, is that of an author overwhelmed by the memory of her father's commanding presence. In Julius and The Parasites, for example, she introduces the image of a domineering but deadly father and the daring subject of incest.
In Rebecca, on the other hand, du Maurier fuses psychological realism with a sophisticated version of the Cinderella story.
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Displaying 1 - 16 of 16 reviews
August 24, 2018
The Years Between is a play by Daphne du Maurier, written in 1943 and set against the backdrop of the Second World War. Remembered now mainly as a novelist and short story writer, Daphne du Maurier only wrote one other play, "September Tide", in 1948.
The action of The Years Between takes place in the library and living room of an English country house, just as the war is coming to an end. At the beginning of the play we learn that the house's owner, Colonel Michael Wentworth, MP, is presumed dead after his plane had crashed into the sea on a flight to Europe, three years earlier. It is clear that his wife, Diana, idolised and perhaps idealised her husband. She decides to take over Michael's parliamentary seat, in memory of him. According to the mores of the time, this was acceptable - perhaps almost expected - of the gentry class, although it dates the play quite considerably. Another key character in the play is the Wentworth's neighbour, the farmer Richard Llewellyn. Predictably enough a romantic relationship develops between the two, and Richard becomes almost a father substitute for their son. A key indicator of this seems to be that Richard Llewellyn teaches the boy how to fish!
The first few scenes of the play are rather dreary and set-bound, very much of their time, the constrained stiff upper-lip attitudes now seeming tiresome and cliched. It is only when Michael returns that the interest picks up. Inevitably secrets are kept to start with, and the relationships between the characters begin to gain some depth, as the concomitant stresses begin to reveal themselves. As Michael says,
"The dead should not return. We're just not in tune any more."
And when his wife challenges both his unremitting sardonic bitterness, and his apparent contempt for all her political endeavours, with her outburst,
"I thought we were fighting for a new world,"
he counters with "Was the old one so bad?"
By this time we are intrigued as to how the action is going to pan out, and it becomes less of a mystery as to why this minor work was revived in 2007. At that time, "The Stage" magazine's view was that,
"the play-offers only a toff's eye of Britain at war, with a live-in servant and a cellar full of claret, even if Spam fritters are on the menu."
An amusing summing-up, but perhaps slightly unfair. It is entirely believable that upper-class English people of the time did behave in this overly reserved and (it has to be said) sanctimonious way. And Daphne du Maurier would be well qualified to write about people of this type, period and class.
On the other hand, the play was not well received even on its initial run. Beverley Baxter, a theatre critic and also an MP, wrote a newspaper article in the "Evening Standard" entitled "It Might Have Been So Good",
"When the curtain rose again we waited for the unfolding of a tragedy or the playing out of an ironic comedy. Unhappily, Miss Du Maurier had shot her bolt. Having created an admirable situation, she could do nothing to resolve it. So she decided to end the war, which was accomplished by the use of the radio and, one has to record, to the titters of some people in the audience... What a pity that Miss Du Maurier abandoned the play for a message! There are so many messages these days and so few plays."
Daphne du Maurier had stated that the play was partly autobiographical, although also based on another real-life story. Margaret Forster quotes the relevant incident in her biography,
"John Rathbone, MP for Bodmin, was reported missing in 1940. His wife was returned unopposed to fill his place when his death was confirmed. In 1942 she remarried and shortly afterwards it was rumoured that her first husband was, after all, alive and a prisoner. The rumour turned out to be untrue."
Another critic contemporary with Daphne du Maurier had called it,
"a poor and empty play... a novelettish distortion of a contemporary problem... the note is one of genteel reverence. We are at war in 1940 but not an aeroplane engine is heard. The returned soldier, with a highly justifiable dislike of everything and everybody he finds, is the only character you can believe in, and there isn't one you can like, and that goes particularly for nanny."
To sum up, although the critics are 70-odd years apart, they do make similar observations. Admittedly the points they make are valid, although perhaps they err a little on the harsh side, their waspish wittiness aiming to improve the entertainment value of their journalistic efforts. The play itself feels like a pale imitation of Noel Coward, but it is still an interesting slant on the works of Daphne du Maurier. It has an upbeat ending - presumably the "message" referred to so disparagingly by the first critic, with a eulogy on how it was time for a fresh start; how people could be courageous and learn from what had gone before - a message very typical of post-war feelings and attitudes.
The action of The Years Between takes place in the library and living room of an English country house, just as the war is coming to an end. At the beginning of the play we learn that the house's owner, Colonel Michael Wentworth, MP, is presumed dead after his plane had crashed into the sea on a flight to Europe, three years earlier. It is clear that his wife, Diana, idolised and perhaps idealised her husband. She decides to take over Michael's parliamentary seat, in memory of him. According to the mores of the time, this was acceptable - perhaps almost expected - of the gentry class, although it dates the play quite considerably. Another key character in the play is the Wentworth's neighbour, the farmer Richard Llewellyn. Predictably enough a romantic relationship develops between the two, and Richard becomes almost a father substitute for their son. A key indicator of this seems to be that Richard Llewellyn teaches the boy how to fish!
The first few scenes of the play are rather dreary and set-bound, very much of their time, the constrained stiff upper-lip attitudes now seeming tiresome and cliched. It is only when Michael returns that the interest picks up. Inevitably secrets are kept to start with, and the relationships between the characters begin to gain some depth, as the concomitant stresses begin to reveal themselves. As Michael says,
"The dead should not return. We're just not in tune any more."
And when his wife challenges both his unremitting sardonic bitterness, and his apparent contempt for all her political endeavours, with her outburst,
"I thought we were fighting for a new world,"
he counters with "Was the old one so bad?"
By this time we are intrigued as to how the action is going to pan out, and it becomes less of a mystery as to why this minor work was revived in 2007. At that time, "The Stage" magazine's view was that,
"the play-offers only a toff's eye of Britain at war, with a live-in servant and a cellar full of claret, even if Spam fritters are on the menu."
An amusing summing-up, but perhaps slightly unfair. It is entirely believable that upper-class English people of the time did behave in this overly reserved and (it has to be said) sanctimonious way. And Daphne du Maurier would be well qualified to write about people of this type, period and class.
On the other hand, the play was not well received even on its initial run. Beverley Baxter, a theatre critic and also an MP, wrote a newspaper article in the "Evening Standard" entitled "It Might Have Been So Good",
"When the curtain rose again we waited for the unfolding of a tragedy or the playing out of an ironic comedy. Unhappily, Miss Du Maurier had shot her bolt. Having created an admirable situation, she could do nothing to resolve it. So she decided to end the war, which was accomplished by the use of the radio and, one has to record, to the titters of some people in the audience... What a pity that Miss Du Maurier abandoned the play for a message! There are so many messages these days and so few plays."
Daphne du Maurier had stated that the play was partly autobiographical, although also based on another real-life story. Margaret Forster quotes the relevant incident in her biography,
"John Rathbone, MP for Bodmin, was reported missing in 1940. His wife was returned unopposed to fill his place when his death was confirmed. In 1942 she remarried and shortly afterwards it was rumoured that her first husband was, after all, alive and a prisoner. The rumour turned out to be untrue."
Another critic contemporary with Daphne du Maurier had called it,
"a poor and empty play... a novelettish distortion of a contemporary problem... the note is one of genteel reverence. We are at war in 1940 but not an aeroplane engine is heard. The returned soldier, with a highly justifiable dislike of everything and everybody he finds, is the only character you can believe in, and there isn't one you can like, and that goes particularly for nanny."
To sum up, although the critics are 70-odd years apart, they do make similar observations. Admittedly the points they make are valid, although perhaps they err a little on the harsh side, their waspish wittiness aiming to improve the entertainment value of their journalistic efforts. The play itself feels like a pale imitation of Noel Coward, but it is still an interesting slant on the works of Daphne du Maurier. It has an upbeat ending - presumably the "message" referred to so disparagingly by the first critic, with a eulogy on how it was time for a fresh start; how people could be courageous and learn from what had gone before - a message very typical of post-war feelings and attitudes.
December 28, 2015
When her MP husband is reported killed in action, Diana Wentworth rebuilds her life and takes over his seat. Stars Diana Quick.
January 5, 2013
I listened to this today on Radio 4x and halfway through (upon the return of her husband) I have to admit I had a moment of blood-lust and wondered how long it would be before Diana killed her husband - what an absolutely awful man and the family were obviously that much better off without him.
I was disappointed that Diana seemed to suddenly sink under the weight of his out-of-date expectations...she seemed initially strong and then she became weak and almost pathetic. As for her husband; I wanted to strangle him; selfish, foul and chauvanistic.
Overall not what I expected when I started listening. Not badly written, just disappointing.
I was disappointed that Diana seemed to suddenly sink under the weight of his out-of-date expectations...she seemed initially strong and then she became weak and almost pathetic. As for her husband; I wanted to strangle him; selfish, foul and chauvanistic.
Overall not what I expected when I started listening. Not badly written, just disappointing.
February 15, 2025
Loved seeing du Maurier’s previous themes appear in this play such as returns, shadows and the past (as she writes them so well!). There were also some lines which sounded like they had been plucked right of Rebecca which was interesting. It didn’t have the edge that I feel her novels have, but what she did with the stage to represent Michael’s discomfort with change was very clever in portraying the irretrievability of the past.
March 22, 2024
Listened to this on BBC Sounds. It is far more gentle than some of her other stories, but is about decent people put in an impossible terrible situation, and how they manage.
It's odd to think how different Britain is from these times, set right at the end of the war.
It's odd to think how different Britain is from these times, set right at the end of the war.
June 6, 2018
This was a short play with a few twists here and there. Not as exciting as some of her other stuff, but I always enjoy reading Daphne du Maurier.
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February 14, 2025interesting, outside of her usual work so not sure i enjoyed as fully
July 24, 2020
"For my grandchildren who have brought me so much happiness"
The war left deep scars. Visible to the eye, painful to the skin and mournful to the heart. Helena left her little village in the hopes of a new life and central London seemed idyllic. The city was new and alive with all kinds of possibilities and she was receptive to it all.
Hello Book Buddies 🌸 I love a good new adventure book. Defs a lift-me-up-and-motivate-me book
The war left deep scars. Visible to the eye, painful to the skin and mournful to the heart. Helena left her little village in the hopes of a new life and central London seemed idyllic. The city was new and alive with all kinds of possibilities and she was receptive to it all.
Hello Book Buddies 🌸 I love a good new adventure book. Defs a lift-me-up-and-motivate-me book
May 14, 2013
She should have left her total arse of a husband and went with the farmer. Could not have made a better case for the virtues of divorce if that had been its intention. Get that condescending, selfish, arrogant arsehole tae fuck!
February 12, 2011
I found the characters too unlikeable to really enjoy this.
September 11, 2021
Do not read the longer description of the play as it gives away the big reveal. Great stuff nice plot twists and ambiguity
April 21, 2022
I enjoyed listening to this play. Very much of its time so may disappoint many today but I thought it was good keeping its date in mind.
February 9, 2026
diana i am so sad for you
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July 7, 20191922-1939 London and Norfolk
Displaying 1 - 16 of 16 reviews