Daphne du Maurier and Her Body of Writing
Literary history is littered with texts labelled as “populist,” “romantic,” or “escapist,” and most of them were written by female authors whose names await scholarly resurrection. Daphne du Maurier’s work survives despite these designations because it is disturbing, challenging, brutal, uncompromising, and difficult. Du Maurier writes unlikeable characters, and more interestingly, unlikeable women. Written long before Gone Girl (Gillian Flynn, 2014) and Killing Eve (Luke Jennings, 2014), her short stories present female psychopaths; or wives, mothers, and girlfriends who are distinctly unpleasant. They are ambitious, dishonest, spiteful, cynical, cruel, while their male counterparts are fragile egomaniacs or dim-witted ingénus. Du Maurier’s characters may be unsympathetic and in her literary dystopias the anti-romantic vehicle is steered by the anti-heroine and anti-hero towards inexorable doom—but the short fiction is gripping.
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