[In the following review, Yardley examines du Maurier's place in literary history, asserting that the “sense of du Maurier as popular writer and public presence is largely absent in Forster's biography.”]

Writing in the current issue of the American Scholar about Carol Brightman's life of Mary McCarthy, the British novelist John Wain makes a salient point about literary biography as currently practiced: “When a writer who once had a considerable readership, and whose books earned a steady royalty, finally runs out and ceases to be hot property, he or she is recycled into biog-fodder. Nobody may be reading So-and-so anymore, but the punters will shell out for a detailed biography of So-and-so, especially if there is anything nasty in the woodshed.”

Thus Brightman's McCarthy and thus, now, Margaret Forster's Daphne du Maurier in Daphne du Maurier. Unlike her American counterparts Forster manages to keep her sense of scandal and indignation under control, but she delivers the raw goods all the same that Daphne du Maurier had a physical relationship with one of her school teachers who was a woman; that this was followed by a premarital affair with Carol Reed, who in time became a distinguished film director; that her marriage to the celebrated soldier Frederick Arthur Montague “Boy” Browning turned arid at the end of World War II; that she fell madly in love with Ellen Doubleday, wife of her American publisher, and that when this failed of consummation she fell into the arms of the actress Gertrude Lawrence, “the only person with whom she had truly been able to be herself.”

“I hope I haven't got Venetian tendencies,” du Maurier wrote in an early letter to her former governess, “Venetian” being her peculiar private euphemism for “lesbian,” but have them she most certainly did. As a girl she had yearned to be a boy, and for the rest of her life she struggled with only intermittent success to keep the boy “shut up in the box inside her.” Years later, in middle age, du Maurier insisted that “nobody could be more bored with all the ‘L’ people than I am” and that “my Jack-in-the-box was, and is, unique.”

Perhaps at the time it was, but it isn't now, not after being dragged through more than 400 pages of microscopic inspection at the hands of Forster, whose subdued and sympathetic tone cannot disguise the fundamentally prurient nature of this exercise. That what she tells us is inherently interesting goes without saying—only the terminally priggish would deny the appeal of the higher gossip, especially when it is lurid gossip—but whether it is important is another question altogether.

There are only two reasons why it could be so: if the fiction of Daphne du Maurier is important and if her sexual struggles were important to the making of that fiction. On the second point Forster proves her point; she makes a persuasive case that “the relationship between a man who was powerful and a woman who was not” is a recurrent theme in du Maurier's stories and novels, and that the author's treatment of the theme is directly related to her own bisexuality.

But it is the first question that really matters; this Forster only briefly and indirectly addresses. That du Maurier's suspenseful romances were hugely popular in her day, from the late '30s until the early '70s, goes without saying; she has readers even now, as is suggested by Doubleday's publication this month of a new hardcover edition of Rebecca, priced at ＄20. It can also be argued that within the limits of genre her novels are highly literate and unfailingly professional. Still, as the literati delight in reminding us, popularity is an inadequate measure of quality; professionalism, though admirable, is not the same as originality.

Literary judgments are as fallible and quirky as the people who make them, but one would have to look long and hard in order to find a reputable critic who would make large claims for du Maurier's work on purely literary grounds. The inescapable truth is that she was a good writer but scarcely an important one. Thus the pertinence to anything except gossip of the private information that Forster has collected is very difficult to discern. Reading about it may be amusing, but it tells us nothing that we need to know.

Be all of that as it may, it must be acknowledged that in Forster's portrait du Maurier emerges as an interesting and far from unappealing person. Her roots were distinguished and somewhat eccentric; her grandfather, George du Maurier, was the author of Trilby and other books, while her father, Gerald, was a most successful actor. She grew up in privileged circumstances but had a genuinely empathetic interest in the lives of those less fortunate. Though she was pretty and gave the impression of being malleable, “her real self was a tough, inner person, watching, absorbing and feverishly creating in her head a wildly different world from the one in which she lived.”

She may not have been a great writer, but she was a natural one; stories and characters presented themselves to her full-blown, demanding to be brought to life on paper. From the summer of 1938, when du Maurier was 31 and Rebecca was published, until the late 1970s, she worked steadily and productively at her craft. She earned a lot of money—much of which, to her fury, was consumed by Britain's punitive taxes—and she developed a large, ardently loyal following.

This sense of du Maurier as popular writer and public presence is largely absent in Forster's biography. In part this is because du Maurier was insistently private, but in larger part it is because this essential aspect of her life simply seems not to interest Forster. Thus it is that the film adaptations of du Maurier's work, through which millions first encountered that work, go virtually unmentioned beyond a casual aside to the effect that du Maurier felt that movies distorted novels; yet surely the affinity Alfred Hitchcock felt for her fiction deserves some comment, as do the performances of Laurence Olivier and Joan Fontaine in Rebecca.

The problem is that Forster is so fixated on du Maurier's life that she scants the work. In so doing she ignores, or is merely unaware of, an essential truth about literary biography: If the work doesn't matter, neither does the writer.