SOURCE: “On the Road to Manderley,” in Washington Post Book World, October 3, 1993, p. 3.

In the following review, Yardley examines du Maurier's place in literary history, asserting that the “sense of du Maurier as popular writer and public presence is largely absent in Forster's biography.”

Writing in the current issue of the American Scholar about Carol Brightman's life of Mary McCarthy, the British novelist John Wain makes a salient point about literary biography as currently practiced: “When a writer who once had a considerable readership, and whose books earned a steady royalty, finally runs out and ceases to be hot property, he or she is recycled into biog-fodder. Nobody may be reading So-and-so anymore, but the punters will shell out for a detailed biography of So-and-so, especially if there is anything nasty in the woodshed.”

Thus Brightman's McCarthy and thus, now, Margaret Forster's Daphne du Maurier in Daphne du...