SOURCE: “A Hidden Struggle,” in Los Angeles Times Book Review, December 26, 1993, pp. 3, 5.

In the following review, Kessler explores the revelations found in Daphne du Maurier and discusses how they shed light on du Maurier's fiction.

In recent years, biography as a genre has been callously transformed. We have come to recognize its unwillingness to leave any page unturned in a life: no place remains private: we must be privy to every transgression of the learned, the talented or famous, no matter what—alcoholism, marital violence, perverse sexual proclivities.

Readers will lap up such intelligence, whether it be Freud's cocaine addiction, Jack Kennedy's lust for actresses or Laurence Olivier's fling with Danny Kaye. Yet we might well question what such intimate revelations really add up to in recounting the life of a politician, an athlete, or actor, scientist, artist? Do they, we wonder, contribute anything to an understanding of...