Here we have a passion whose course, conveyed in letters by one of the parties alone, begins in June — when the man returns to England from the Far East, and introduces himself to Mrs B, by courtesy of a mutual acquaintance — and runs till December, when he tires of the affair and sails back to China. It is very cleverly done, with style and economy; not many young writers would know precisely what to leave out, but du Maurier does not put a foot wrong, and we come away feeling that we have read far more than is actually on the page. The subtext is there; the detail and depth are for us to supply.
The final story, ‘The Limpet’, published when Daphne was already famous, is brilliant in technique and revelation, written from the point of view of a woman without a smidgeon of self-awareness, whose life is one long, selfish blunder, concealed beneath the guise of concern for others. It is clever and it is brave, because we dislike the character thoroughly and yet cannot resist her appalling company.
And there is the nub of Daphne du Maurier’s great talent as a fiction writer, which is so marked even in these sometimes lack-lustre stories. She is almost without equal among 20th-century writers in being able to create utterly convincing, dislikeable, selfish, even wicked characters, to make one of them the centrepiece of book after book, story after story, and to win our avid attention and understanding, even as we recoil. The people in these stories are greedy, vapid, exploitative, underhand, manipulative and insensitive—and yet we cannot get enough of them.
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