SOURCE: “Peter Ibbetson,” in her George du Maurier, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1969, pp. 416-30.

In the following essay, Ormond critiques Du Maurier's Peter Ibbetson, finding the Passy scenes laudable but the rest of the novel somewhat unsatisfactory and disjointed.

The discovery that Du Maurier could write a romantic novel came as a great surprise to most of his friends. They scarcely knew what to make of Peter Ibbetson, published in Harper's Monthly in 1891. Kate Greenaway's reaction was characteristic: ‘I have always liked Mr du Maurier, but to think there was all this, and one didn’t know it. I feel as if I had all this time been doing him a great injustice—not to know’.¹ It was the age at which Du Maurier had decided to write that caused the most amazement. When he began writing Peter Ibbetson he was fifty-five. Although his health was still reasonable...