There is a whiff of apology about the beginning of this book. Daphne du Maurier is known to be a trashy writer of escapist romance: you're likely to find Jamaica Inn, Frenchman's Creek and Rebecca in the teenage section, and the other titles practically nowhere - so why this ardent study? By the end of it, though, Nina Auerbach has achieved quite a rehabilitation. This du Maurier is not one of a brace of representative low-culture populists. Nor is she reduced to her exemplary anti-climactic, 20th-century life. We are fed just enough of the lame glamour of the du Maurier clan, the coy code words and the repressed bisexuality, to clarify the way inherited themes were reworked, with shocking bleakness, into stories of inheritance that were so unorthodox and so freakish as to be invisible.

LRB 2 November 2000 | PDF Download