Criticism > Contemporary Literary Criticism > Du Maurier, Daphne (Vol. 11) - Basil Davenport

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BASIL DAVENPORT

So Cinderella married the prince, and then her story began. Cinderella was hardly more than a school-girl, and the overworked companion of a snobbish woman of wealth; the prince was Maximilian de Winter, whom she had heard of as the owner of Manderley in Cornwall, one of the most magnificent show places in England, who had come to the Riviera to forget the tragic death of his wife Rebecca…. There was some mystery about Rebecca's death …; but the book is skillfully contrived so that it does not depend only on knowledge of it for its thrill; it can afford to give no hint of it till two-thirds of the way through. But the revelation, when it comes, leads to one of the most prolonged, deadly, and breathless fencing-matches that one can find in fiction, a battle of wits that would by itself make the fortune of a melodrama on the stage.

For this is a melodrama, unashamed, glorying in its own quality, such as we have hardly had since that other...

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1. Introduction
2. Sean O'Faolain
3. Basil Davenport
4. John Raymond
5. Edward Weeks
6. Pat Rogers
7. E. S. Turner
8. Doris Grumbach
9. Copyright

1. Daphne du Maurier