[Forster is an English novelist, biographer, and critic. In the following excerpt from her authorized biography of du Maurier, she examines the stories collected in The Apple Tree.]

[In the winter of 1949, Daphne] wrote a new collection of short stories [The Apple Tree] which were a completely new departure. These were strange, morbid stories, in which deep undercurrents of resentment and even hatred revealed far more about Daphne's inner fantasy life than any novel had ever done. ('All those stories have inner significance for problems of that time,' she later wrote.) They included a novella, Monte Verita, which completely bewildered Victor Gollancz [du Maurier's publisher], who commented: 'I don't understand the slight implication that there is something wrong with sex.' This novella is about a woman, Anna, who is mesmerized by a mysterious sect who live in a secret world in the mountains in Central Europe. She joins them and disappears. The whole point of the story is that in her 'Monte Verita' Anna has found a spiritual happiness she could never find with her husband or any man. Sexual love between a man and a woman no longer means anything to her, and all the young women who became part of her sect are now saved from 'the turmoil of a brief romance turning to humdrum married life'. What disturbed Victor most was that in the first version Anna, once she is safe in her Monte Verita, turns into a man. At Victor's insistence, Daphne changed this and Anna remains a woman but, as he had picked up, the general drift of this highly metaphorical story is that there is something wrong with sex between men and women—it spoils relationships, it drains energy, it gets in the way of self-fulfilment. Written by a woman who was in the middle of her first love-affair with another woman for twenty years, it seems strikingly significant.

The title story, 'The Apple Tree', seems even more so. It tells of a man who, after his wife has died, notices an apple tree, which has never borne blossom or fruit, suddenly flourishing. He becomes convinced that the tree represents his wife, whom he never really loved because 'she always seemed to put a blight on everything' and because they had lived 'in different worlds . . . their minds not meeting'. All his efforts go into trying to destroy the tree, but in the end, when finally he has hacked it into logs and given it away, he trips over its root and is trapped in the snow. It is very hard to decide quite how Daphne intended this story to be read: is the hatred of the man for his dead wife justified, or does he get his deserts? Or is the whole story meant to damn marriages in which true minds do not meet—as in her own. . . . Whatever the origin of 'The Apple Tree', it was all of a piece with the volume's general theme of sex as trouble, in one way or another, of the sexual urge causing violence and even murder.

Two of the other four stories very forcibly emphasized this and have a distinctly nasty tone to them. 'The Little Photographer' tells of a rich woman on holiday who has everything she wants except a lover (her husband is not with her). She finds herself wanting to have a love-affair, as long as it can be 'a thing of silence' with a stranger, so that it is just sex and nothing more. She sets her sights on a crippled photographer whom she meets while working on a cliff. She asks him, 'Why don't you kiss me?' and he does, which gives her a delicious furtive sense of excitement—'What she did was without emotion of any sort, her mind and affections quite untouched.' But eventually sex with the photographer becomes a boring ritual. One day she doesn't turn up. He is distraught and says she is his life, he cannot do without her. He tells her she is wicked when she offers him money to go away, and she pushes him over the cliff. Her husband arrives to take her home and she thinks she has got away with both the love-affair (in which there was no love) and the murder, but on the last page it is made clear that she will not do so and will be condemned to a future life of guilt and blackmail.

All the details of the plot in this unpleasant story are incredible, but the atmosphere is convincing. The coldness of the woman, her contempt for the poor photographer, her ruthlessness—all these repel but fascinate. The woman's ideal, 'passion between strangers', sex as something to discard, is ugly but argued with such conviction that the attempt at the end to make her pay some sort of price seems weak. Another story, 'Kiss Me Again, Stranger', has an even more brutal view of sex. A young mechanic picks up a cinema usherette. They go into a cemetery and she tells him to kiss her but that she likes him silent. He feels himself falling in love with her and starts fantasizing about their future together. He leaves her reluctantly and goes home. Next day he reads about the murder of an RAF man and realizes that the murderess was his girl. The plot is totally unbelievable, but once again the atmosphere is not.

After such macabre happenings, the other two stories in this collection come as a relief, although here again, in one of them at least, there are autobiographical connections freely acknowledged by the author. 'The Old Man' is a simply told story which turns out to be a spoof. The old man is described as big and strong. He lives by a lake with his wife but has driven his children away, so he can be alone with her, 'which is what he has always wanted'. In the last three lines it is revealed that the old man is, in fact, a swan. Often, after she had written this story, Daphne would refer to Tommy [her husband] as 'just like "The Old Man'"—wanting her to himself, jealous, she believed, of the attention she gave her children, especially Kits [their son]. 'But that is not the whole significance of the story,' she commented. 'The real significance is that Moper [Tommy] must not kill his only begotten son but kill the petty jealous self which is his hidden nature, and so rise again.' This, she thought, 'is the truth behind Christianity and all the religions'. But the story she liked best, and which 'just came bubbling out', fitted into no pattern. 'The Birds' is a wholly atmospheric story, beautifully paced and unmarred by the intricacies of plot which sometimes spoiled Daphne's original ideas. The tension of birds attacking humans in hordes is sustained throughout. The birds themselves, shuttling on window-sills, pecking at glass panes, swooping in from the sea in millions, are horrifyingly real. ' "The Birds", wrote Victor Gollancz, elated, 'is a masterpiece.'

The whole collection thrilled him, but he was firm in telling Daphne that he did not at all like two other stories she added—'No Motive' and 'Split Second'. She was, he told her, 'one of the few authors . . . with whom I can be frank'. 'No Motive' jarred on him and 'Split Second' was poor. Daphne, as ever, accepted his judgement and dropped these two stories. She told him he really was 'the only publisher in the world' even though she was 'a tinge sorry' about 'Split Second'. He was 'dynamic, exuberant, tender, intolerant and the only publisher for me'. Victor responded that she was 'beautiful, adorable, gracious, charming and good'. This was indeed the high-water mark of their relationship as author and publisher. But Victor warned her that even though he loved the stories she must brace herself for shocked reviews—the violence in them would be noted and probably found abhorrent coming from the pen of the 'romantic' writer she was supposed to be. He was, on the whole, right. Nancy Spain in the Daily Express in particular was revolted by the stories and attacked the author. Victor replied to her in a storming letter . . . , only to be soundly told off by Nancy Spain in turn. Her review, which he had called 'low-down', was, she wrote, perfectly accurate—the stories were 'all concerned with malformation, hatred, blackmail, cruelty and murder' and he shouldn't object to her saying so. Anyone writing such stories was surely sick.

Daphne's own response was to ask who Nancy Spain was and then to dismiss all the reviewers as 'nearly always indifferent writers who can't make a living from their own books and are forced to make a living through shoddy journalism . . . kicking at writers more successful than themselves is probably the only thrill they ever get'. Victor was, in fact, doing her no favours by encouraging her to take this attitude, so that soon she was no longer able to detect genuine and potentially helpful criticism. But it was a pity this collection did not merit more attention, and that it was 'The Birds' which monopolized any attention it did get, because it was a huge improvement on Daphne's previous short stories of her early years.

Not only were these new stories better written, they also showed a shift in the balance of power between the sexes which she had been working out for some twenty years now in her novels. The women were no longer pathetic and exploited, the men no longer always powerful and dominant. Now, women were often in control and making men suffer. Women had become quite vicious creatures, perfectly capable of tricking, and even killing, men as they had been tricked and killed in the early stories. Daphne's friends and family were rather taken aback at this strain of brutality she displayed, but she was unrepentant and talked cheerfully of 'my macabre tastes' without seeming to fear any significance being read into them. But this collection was highly important: it represented a change not only in Daphne's style but in her subject-matter—her 'macabre tastes' at last were acknowledged and given an outlet, reflecting the confusion of her inner self.