Daphne du Maurier, Haunted Heiress

Auerbach examines the writer of depth and recklessness now largely known only as the author of Rebecca , looking at the way her sharp-edged fiction, with its brutal and often perverse family relationships, has been softened in film adaptations of her work. She reads both du Maurier’s life in her writings, and the sensibility of a vanished class and time that haunts the fringes of our own age.