From Library Journal
In an engaging prose style, Auerbach, a scholar of Victorian and feminist studies, reveals her literary passion for du Maurier, which started at age 12 while she was attending summer camp. She devotes a chapter to du Maurier's familyAher grandfather, novelist George du Maurier, and her father, actorAmanager Gerald du Maurier-and how these strong men were reflected in her fiction, turning her novels and stories into a reaction against her male heritage. Auerbach also examines film versions of du Maurier's work, revealing how Hitchcock and others romanticized the dark vision of Rebecca and other fictions. While the critic's emphasis on the gloomy side of du Maurier may turn off some potential readers, she does succeed in her aim of rescuing her chosen author from the label of "romantic writer." For undergraduate and large public library collections.AMorris Hounion, New York City Technical Coll., Brooklyn Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.


The New York Times Book Review, Catherine Saint Louis
...a fascinating portrait of du Maurier's career as family chronicler, avid researcher and frank anatomist of familial cruelty.


From Kirkus Reviews
Last night I dreamed of . . . a Daphne du Maurier whose works were ``startlingly brilliant,'' peopled with ``most unsavory'' men and ``defective'' women, and whose exegesis here is shrouded in literary fog. In this inaugural volume in a new series of Personal Takes, Auerbach (history and literature/Univ. of Pennsylvania; Our Vampires, Ourselves, 1995, etc.) begins with an interesting enough thesis: that the prolific du Maurier (17 novels, 6 biographies, 2 plays, and a dozen collections of articles and stories), now best known for the Alfred Hitchcock movie versions of her novel Rebecca and her sinister short story ``The Birds,'' is unfairly categorized as a writer of ``romances'' in which suffering heroines fall into the arms of masterful males and live happily ever after. In fact, in tales with male narrators like The Scapegoat and ``Hungry Hill'' (among the author's favorites), her protagonists are killers, albeit otherwise dependent and inadequate men; the women, however feisty they may seem, are destined to have ``something gone wrong inside,'' whether it be uterine cancer (Rebecca) or paralysis (The King's General). As if that weren't depressing enough, novels are further described as ``unabashedly dull'' (The Glassblowers) or ``grim'' (Jamaica Inn), and du Maurier herself as weird. The influence of du Maurier's family (which included her grandfather George, the popular author of Trilby and creator of Svengali, whose literary talent Daphne is ``heiress'' to), plus themes of incest, lesbianism, anti-Semitism, and ``boyishness'' (viz. Peter Pan), are analyzed at length. The discussion is frequently muddled and contradictory (at different points, du Maurier was and was not influenced by the Bront sisters). A concluding chapter revisits the films, especially Hitchcock's, excoriating most of them for reducing intense and often ugly emotional conflicts to clichd romance. A valiant but unconvincing effort to resuscitate du Maurier to literary respectability. -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.


Carolyn G. Heilbrun, a.k.a. Amanda Cross
"Auerbach is original, exact, lucid on any subject she chooses to illuminate. She is here, as everywhere, a pleasure to read, as she rescues Du Maurier from her Rebecca fate, giving her her due, and indicating one of the ways in which women, disliking the assigned female role, learn to live with it and vindicate their sense of deprivation in writing."


Frontiers, July 21, 2000
A fine example of how precise research combined with intelligent writing and an amusingly acerbic tone can entertain as well as educate.


Book Description
With the wit and intelligence, Nina Auerbach examines the writer of depth and recklessness now largely known only as the author of Rebecca. Auerbach's Daphne du Maurier is the author of sixteen other novels, along with biographies, articles, plays, memoirs, and short stories. Where other readers have become absorbed by Rebecca, Auerbach finds greater fascination in novels such as The Scapegoat, The House on the Strand, and My Cousin Rachel, books whose protagonists are troubled, even murderous, men succumbing to the haunting of previous generations. Du Maurier herself was haunted by her father, Gerald, creator of the role of Captain Hook in Peter Pan, and grandfather, George, the popular illustrator and best-selling novelist of Trilby. Daphne du Maurier was the torchbearer of a stellar male line. Her own phrase for her secret self, "the boy in the box," hints at her sexual ambivalence and her alienation from the prescribed roles for women of her day.


From the Publisher
"Daphne du Maurier, Haunted Heiress" is the first volume in Penn Press's new series, "Personal Takes," in which noted critics write about the persistent hold particular writers, artists, or cultural phenomena have had on their imaginations.


From the Author
"My experience with Daphne du Maurier has always been the same. I devour her, leave her, and vaguely decide that she satisfied some immature neurotic need in me that I no longer have. Then some years later I read her again and I fall into her world. . . . She's a complex, powerful, unique writer, so unorthodox that no critical tradition, from formalism to feminism, can digest her."-from Chapter 1


About the Author
Nina Auerbach is John Welsh Centennial Professor of History and Literature at the University of Pennsylvania.

SYNOPSIS

Auerbach (history and literature, University of Pennsylvania) examines the writer of depth and recklessness now largely known only as the author of Rebecca, looking at how her sharp-edged fiction, with its brutal and often perverse family relationships, has been softened in film adaptations of her work. She reads both du Maurier's life in her writings, and the sensibility of a vanished class and time that haunts the fringes of our own age. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

FROM THE CRITICS

Library Journal

In an engaging prose style, Auerbach, a scholar of Victorian and feminist studies, reveals her literary passion for du Maurier, which started at age 12 while she was attending summer camp. She devotes a chapter to du Maurier's family--her grandfather, novelist George du Maurier, and her father, actor--manager Gerald du Maurier-and how these strong men were reflected in her fiction, turning her novels and stories into a reaction against her male heritage. Auerbach also examines film versions of du Maurier's work, revealing how Hitchcock and others romanticized the dark vision of Rebecca and other fictions. While the critic's emphasis on the gloomy side of du Maurier may turn off some potential readers, she does succeed in her aim of rescuing her chosen author from the label of "romantic writer." For undergraduate and large public library collections.--Morris Hounion, New York City Technical Coll., Brooklyn Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.

Internet Book Watch

Du Maurier is the author of almost twenty novels, articles, plays, memoirs and short stories; yet is known for a relatively limited handful of popular works. Daphne Du Maurier: Haunted Heiress analyzes her lesser-known volumes and their characters, providing a strong literary analysis of metaphors in her writing, and ethnic and social observations of her choices and times. The result is a revealing, absorbing study.

WHAT PEOPLE ARE SAYING