Daphne du Maurier lived in Cornwall for forty years, twenty-five of them in Menabilly, a seventeenth-century house that she described as the most beautiful she had ever seen. Cornwall, a region of mystery and superstition, the home of legendary figures such as King Arthur and Tristan and Iseult, is a landscape easily made Gothic; it is the home, as well, of pirates both fictional and historical, with a coastline that has been responsible for innumerable shipwrecks. While never a fully assimilated Cornishwoman, du Maurier was certainly inspired by her adopted home, the setting of some of her best and best-known novels: Jamaica Inn (1936), Frenchman's Creek (1941), and The House on the Strand (1969). In these, and in others to a lesser degree, one finds a strong sense of place: Cornwall and Menabilly are made a dramatic part of the works, like Thomas Hardy's Dorset, D. H. Lawrence's Nottinghamshire, and, even...