Willow Forrester, who hopes someday to become a concert pianist …, suffers a "nervous breakdown" when she learns she has been adopted; and she has to be absent from boarding school for a term. In the quiet atmosphere and beauty of a Cornish guesthouse by the sea, Willow shakes off her depression…. [Requiem for a Princess] is remarkable not only for its vivid expression but also for its unusual structure—the paralleling of Willow's situation with that of another orphan through Willow's dreams of a sixteenth-century girl…. (p. 211)

Requiem for a Princess is a much less subtle performance than [Ruth Arthur's] earlier book of youth and hauntings [A Candle in Her Room]…. [Willow, the narrator,] is a schoolgirl with unusual gifts as a pianist. Though happy enough with her parents, she is appalled to learn, from a tactless friend, that she is their adopted daughter…. Ill and dispirited, she goes with her mother to Cornwall, where they stay at a private hotel, once an Elizabethan manor, home of the Tresilian family….

[Something] does catch Willow's interest—a portrait of a young girl in Elizabethan clothes "with huge dark eyes and elaborate hair style" [who turns out to be an ancestor of the family, also an adopted daughter.]…

Obsessed by the Spanish girl, Willow has a series of dreams which take her through Isabel's story; she emerges with thoughts of her own, of reconciliation, gratitude, and the wish to give, not take. A good enough conclusion but far too heavily achieved. Isabel, who takes so much of the tale with her Spanish ambience, is a pasteboard figure throughout. Her problems are those of circumstance, not of personality, and Willow's lose their edge along with hers. (p. 1141)

The Times Literary Supplement (© Times Newspapers Ltd. (London) 1967; reproduced from The Times Literary Supplement by permission), November 30, 1967.

[Requiem for a Princess] is less impressive than A Candle in Her Room, but a deft weaving together of interesting strands; recommended to both pre- and present du Maurier fans. (p. 384)

The Junior Bookshelf, December, 1967.

To her usual preoccupation with evil incarnate, preceded by uneasiness and omens, Miss Arthur adds a shadow of miscegenation and anxiety over an autistic child, and it would be easy to dismiss [Portrait of Margarita] as pretentious melodrama if Margarita weren't the quintessentially empathetic mousey adolescent growing into glowing womanhood; if guardian Cousin Francis weren't the archetypical rich British bachelor, handsome and accomplished; if the settings, a mellow Oxfordshire mill and a dramatic Italian lakeside villa, weren't so cinematically alluring. None of this cancels out the phoniness of Francis' old nurse Miss Laura's malevolent threat to Margarita and to his sister before (jealousy, jealousy), nor the objectionable and untimely nature of Margarita's color-consciousness…. You suspect—it's all very hush-hush—but you don't know until the next-to-last page that Margarita's grandmother was black…. The trouble with this sort of thing is that it's insidious and girls will wallow in it, maybe even swallow it. (p. 121)

Kirkus Service (copyright © 1968 Virginia Kirkus' Service, Inc.), February 1, 1968.

A strong element of mystery akin to horror underlines the plot [in Portrait of Margarita], when a former governess to Margarita's guardian issues sinister threats to her, and finally attempts to have her drowned. The whole story moves swiftly, and makes very compelling reading…. Teen-age girls will like this story very much, and if it has some of the ingredients of escapist literature, then the author's skill creates a haunting story from them. (pp. 232-33)

The Junior Bookshelf, August, 1968.