SOURCE: “Something about Her Eyes,” in London Review of Books, Vol. 15, No. 12, June 24, 1993, pp. 20–22.

In the following positive review, Beer finds Daphne du Maurier to be a well-organized and thorough biography of the writer.

If in doubt start with the weather. This is a piece of advice that has long been followed by biographers who have mixed feelings about the claims of their subjects to the extensive treatment they are about to apply: subjects, perhaps, whose rank or connections would certainly sell the book but who in any meritocracy would themselves have sunk without trace. Interestingly, the opening paragraph of Margaret Forster's Daphne du Maurier makes good use of this particular technique: ‘Sheet-lightning split the sky over London on the evening of 12 May 1907 and thunder rumbled long into the night. All day it had been sultry, the trees in Regent's Park barely moving and a heat haze obscuring...