SOURCE: “Du Maurier and Rebecca Revisited,” in Christian Science Monitor, Vol. 86, No. 34, January 12, 1994, p. 17.

In the following review, Rubin offers a mixed assessment of Daphne du Maurier.

For much of her professional life, British writer Daphne du Maurier was dogged by feelings of disappointment at not being considered a serious artist.

Rebecca, du Maurier's most celebrated novel, published in 1938 and shortly thereafter made into a classic Hitchcock film, is still widely read today. But its fame overshadowed her subsequent work, including such novels as My Cousin Rachel (1951), The Scapegoat (1957), and The House on the Strand (1969), and her short stories, the best-known of which furnished further material for Hitchcock: The Birds.

Ironically, some of the very qualities that once relegated du Maurier to second-class literary citizenship now excite the interest of feminist scholars engaged in reexamining women's lives and writings. Romantic myths of brooding, strong-willed aristocratic men, lovelorn Cinderellas...