There was a time not so very long ago when a sustained festschrift-style tribute to Daphne du Maurier from her literary admirers, with a forward by the Rector of the Royal College of Art, would have been altogether unimaginable. The critical establishment during her lifetime found something irksome about her fecundity of talent, commercial success and mercurial versatility and, perhaps a touch envious of her existence as a Cornish châtelaine married to a general in the royal household, refused to take her seriously.

Whatever du Maurier’s social status, her novels and short stories, mapping a world of transgression and dishonesty, were emphatically unrespectable. Women leading unfulfilled lives in suburban villas furtively borrowed them from the public library (when such places existed) and devoured each unimproving chronicle of feisty heroines setting convention at nought, skulduggery at the manor or brushes with the macabre in the hope that some of the writer’s subversive knowingness might rub off on them.

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