Readymoney cottage near Fowey, Cornwall, was 1940s home of the author of Rebecca and Frenchman’s Creek

The house boasts four bedrooms, lovely views across a Cornish cove and a garden with a tennis court. And if that is not tempting enough it has a rich literary history thrown in for free.

Daphne du Maurier, the author of Rebecca and Frenchman’s Creek, one imagines, once sat at an upstairs window of Readymoney cottage in Fowey and sought inspiration as she gazed across the water. She rented the house in the early 1940s and it remains one of the sites of pilgrimage for the many fans who arrive in Cornwall from across the world looking for traces of the writer.

Now being sold for the best part of £2m, estate agent Savills describes the cottage as an “exceptionally appealing detached coastal residence” in “one of the most desirable parts of Fowey”. Du Maurier’s cast iron bath, the agency points out, is now a feature in the garden.

The cottage was originally built as a coach house and stables for the nearby waterfront Italianate mansion, Point Neptune.

By the time she arrived at Readymoney in 1942 with her three children, du Maurier had already written Rebecca and Frenchman’s Creek. But according to her biographer Margaret Forster, she arrived under something of a cloud.

She had been staying with friends in a grand house in Hertfordshire while her husband, Lieutenant General Sir Frederick Browning, was away busy setting up Britain’s first airborne division. Unfortunately, according to Forster, Du Maurier, was caught in an embrace with her hostess’s husband. Du Maurier, then 34, wrote to a friend that “after many probings and thinkings” she was moving to Cornwall, where her mother and sisters were living and which had inspired her famous works, to “sort myself out”.

She dreamed of finding a “little hut on a little island” but settled on moving to Readymoney in Fowey in April 1942.

The family was more cramped than they had been in Hertfordshire but were pleased that the cottage was so close to the beach. Du Maurier began work on a new book, Hungry Hill. Forster says the book, a family saga, was a reaction to Frenchman’s Creek, which she had dismissed as frivolous.

She based Hungry Hill loosely — or perhaps not so loosely — on stories she had been told by the man she had been caught in that embrace with – Christopher Puxley.

Forster reports that Puxley used to visit Fowey and stay in a hotel down the road from Readymoney. The pair would meet for picnics and spend time together in an old coastguard’s hut on the cliffs.

In 1943 her husband was hurt in a glider crash in Wiltshire and Du Maurier brought him to Readymoney to nurse him. But after he rejoined his colleagues in north Africa, she is said to have grown tired of life in the cottage.

Her book came out in May 1943 and was disliked by the critics. At the end of September the lease on Readymoney ran out and she set up home at nearby Menabilly, a grander house she had known for years and which is reputedly one of the inspirations for Manderley, the atmospheric but doom-laden house and estate in Rebecca.

The current owners of Readymoney cottage have refurbished it and added a plaque celebrating Du Maurier’s stay. On a number of occasions they have held open days of its gardens, which feature a brook criss-crossed by bridges, so that Du Maurier enthusiasts could soak up the atmosphere.

Justine Hambly-Wooldridge, of the Daphne du Maurier literary centre in Fowey, said the cottage would always be closely associated with the author.

“A lot of people still visit,” she said. “Many people try and go to Menabilly – the mansion she lived in after Readymoney – but it’s very inaccessible and closed to the public.

“There’s still a great deal of interest in her and her homes and the area. We get people from all over Britain and the rest of the world – Americans and Germans especially.

“Many come for the annual festival but others just come to see the places where she lived.”

The Du Maurier house is the latest in a string of homes with literary associations that have come on the market recently. A former holiday home of Charles Dickens, Bleak House in Broadstairs, Kent, was put up for sale earlier this year, as was JG Ballard’s semi in Shepperton, Surrey.

JK Rowling’s former home near Chepstow sold within weeks of being put on the market.