When Daphne du Maurier died at age 81 in 1989 at her home in her beloved Cornwall, England, obituary writers around the world sharpened their pencils. A writer in the London Times called her "one of the most popular novelists in the English-speaking world," with works that "became best sellers . . . almost automatically both in this country and in the United States." The same obituary writer noted that du Maurier "had a natural gift both for the evocation of atmosphere and for the maintenance of suspense . . . she trafficked in dreams, dreams of a kind that seem to be inherent in the unconscious minds of many women, indeed of many men." Her best known novels, including Jamaica Inn, Rebecca, Frenchman's Creek, The Scapegoat, My Cousin Rachel, and The House on the Strand, "represent two classes into which her fiction falls, the cloak-and-dagger romance on the one hand and the Gothic novel on...