SOURCE: “Rereading Rebecca,” in New Yorker, November 8, 1993, pp. 127–38.

In the following review of Daphne du Maurier, Beauman urges a reconsideration of Daphne du Maurier's oeuvre and place in English literature.

Rebecca, first published in 1938, was Daphne du Maurier's fifth novel. She began planning it at a difficult point in her life: it was only a few years after the death of her adored but dominating father, the actor-manager Gerald du Maurier, she was pregnant with her second child; and by the time she actually began writing, at the age of thirty, she was in Egypt, where her husband, Frederick A. M. (Boy) Browning, an officer in the Grenadier Guards, had been posted with his battalion. Du Maurier loathed Alexandria—her longing for England, and in particular for Cornwall, was, she wrote, like “a pain under the heart continually”—and she loathed the role forced upon her in Egypt...