Du Maurier, George - Leonée Ormond (essay date 1969)
Leonée Ormond (essay date 1969)
SOURCE: “Peter Ibbetson,” in her George du Maurier, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1969, pp. 416-30.
[In the following essay, Ormond critiques Du Maurier's Peter Ibbetson, finding the Passy scenes laudable but the rest of the novel somewhat unsatisfactory and disjointed.]
The discovery that Du Maurier could write a romantic novel came as a great surprise to most of his friends. They scarcely knew what to make of Peter Ibbetson, published in Harper's Monthly in 1891. Kate Greenaway's reaction was characteristic: ‘I have always liked Mr du Maurier, but to think there was all this, and one didn’t know it. I feel as if I had all this time been doing him a great injustice—not to know’.1 It was the age at which Du Maurier had decided to write that caused the most amazement. When he began writing Peter Ibbetson he was fifty-five. Although his health was...
[The entire page is 5488 words long]
Join eNotes
Over 3,500 study guides, question and answer forums, literature criticism, reference content, and much more!
Navigate
