SOURCE: “Born to Be a Boy,” in Times Literary Supplement, April 9, 1993, p. 23.

In the following review, Kemp provides an overview of Daphne du Maurier's life and commends Forster's biography of the author as perceptive and revealing.

On a French walking holiday with Daphne du Maurier in 1952, a friend fascinatedly noted her habit of wearing “a zip linen skirt on top of white cotton shorts.” Out in the countryside, she unzipped the skirt and “strode forward like a boy.” Whenever villages were near, she zipped it back into place so that she “was feminine.” This outfit and her use of it could be seen—Margaret Forster's perceptive and revealing biography [Daphne du Maurier] makes clear—as a sartorial symbol of how du Maurier made her way through most of her life.

Doubleness was early impressed on her. The favourite daughter of the actor-manager, Gerald du Maurier, she soon became...