Daphne du Maurier and the Short Story
Like many budding authors before her, the young Daphne du Maurier (1907-1989) turned first to the writing of short stories, poems, and essays before attempting a full novel. Her three models in those late 1920s, before her twentieth birthday and for a couple of years after that, were W. Somerset Maugham, Guy de Maupassant, and Katherine Mansfield, in whose footsteps she dreamed, and sometimes despaired, of following.
Half of the fifty short stories that she published in her lifetime date back to those early years. They are shorter than later productions, and must be read with the same dose of interest and indulgence granted to other writers, enjoying all the well-turned or imaginative passages while chuckling at the rather daring ones, noting all the while the themes that inspired her and the intratextual links between early and later short fictions, especially in terms of material and treatment. As for the other twenty-five stories, starting with...