3In spite of all this, Du Maurier’s relationship with literary criticism has been conflictual ever since the runaway success of Rebecca and the condescending perception of its author as “romantic.” One of the reasons for this recurrent, but far from universal, critical contempt has been that, in the eyes of some reviewers, a work’s popularity necessarily implies its lack of value. Also, beginning with Gerald: A Portrait (1934), her new publisher Victor Gollancz ran aggressive marketing campaigns which made available to the general public many inexpensive – but equally unflattering – editions of her works, sporting drab yellow dustjackets and printed tightly on second-rate paper. Moreover, women’s magazines soon vied with each other to carry her latest novels and short stories, starting with the one-instalment publication of the first few chapters of Rebecca in the August 1941 issue of The Ladies’ Home Journal, to be soon followed by the serialization of most of her works on both sides of the Atlantic. Usually lumped together as superficial organs of middle-class idleness and vapidity, even though some of them made a point of educating the modern woman and prided themselves on being in tune with their time, these magazines did not help Du Maurier’s reputation, though they did bring her considerable sums of money.

6In a novel like Rebecca, for example, critics have underlined, in a sometimes contradictory manner, the presence of a mimetic class conservatism, a form of Gothic in the tradition of the Brontë sisters, a liberating feminism, a lesbian subtext, or additional proof of the incest motif supposedly central to Du Maurier’s fiction. In other words, the sheer number of articles now devoted to Du Maurier means that the wealth of interpretations to which her works lend themselves cannot be ignored anymore – that the time has come to officially expel Du Maurier and her literary production from the sort of middlebrow purgatory to which they were formerly consigned. Such is the aim of this issue, which will provide readers with new critical insights into Du Maurier’s original and multifaceted works while placing them within broader perspectives thanks to contextual analysis.

7To give honour where honour is due, the first part is entitled “‘Je Reviens’, or the Eternal Return of Rebecca.” This is a reference to the name of the dead protagonist’s boat in Du Maurier’s bestseller, whose two French words literally translate into “I’ll be back”, thus sounding like a promise or a threat, as if the fictional boat in question powerfully asserted its perpetual presence or the imminent revelation of repressed truths. This part focuses on the enduring popularity of the novel, on its rivetingly protean ability to capture the imagination, and on its legacy over eighty years after its first publication.

• 7 Margaret Forster, Daphne Du Maurier, London: Arrow Books, 2007, 391.

She was tired of it all, and especially of Rebecca. Never a month went by without someone informing her they were writing a sequel to Rebecca or asking her detailed questions about it which she could not answer. The most popular question was why the heroine had no name, which even Agatha Christie (with whom she enjoyed a short correspondence, though always refusing to meet her) wished to know.7

10Xavier Lachazette starts by highlighting the unfailing popularity of Rebecca, which was an immediate bestseller and has spawned countless adaptations in a wide array of mediums in the eight decades since the novel’s publication, giving it a special status in European literature. Lachazette examines some lesser-known adaptations before detailing Du Maurier’s own reaction to her bestseller. Looking more specifically at two 1962 reviews of her literary production and at various academic articles, Lachazette argues that the difficulty of “categorizing” Du Maurier’s novel is precisely the source of her enduring success with readers and critics alike.

12Milan Hain’s article focuses on the production stage of Hitchcock and Selznick’s canonical film, more specifically on the lengthy process of casting the unnamed female protagonist, by integrating adaptation considerations with star and performance studies. Drawing on archival documents, Hain first considers the convictions which guided independent producer David O. Selznick’s art of literary adaptation. He then compares the surviving screen tests of several candidates for the main role to analyse how the casting of Joan Fontaine affected the characterization of the second Mrs. de Winter.

• 14 Daphne Du Maurier, “Adieu Sagesse”, Early Stories, London: Todd Publishing, 1954, 60.

Half-a-minute… wait… he’d nearly got it… it swung before him out of the mist, the first moment that the queer feeling was to come upon him. He had been sitting one evening long ago, last summer, in his favourite haunt. He must have dropped asleep because in his sleep he had heard a challenge. A challenge, a call, a summons from the depths of his being, clutching at his heart, seizing his mind.14

15It also comes to symbolise the moment when a character has no choice but to give vent to inner struggles that can no longer be kept in check, thus creating a psychologically unsettling state which makes them throw caution, or “wisdom”, to the wind.

16Likewise, as the second part will show, Du Maurier’s work is often disturbing, undermining as it does many a certainty or any fixed sense of identity. For their part, these articles mostly focus on lesser-known and relatively critically neglected works, such as her dramatic output or her very last novel, Rule Britannia, so often decried by Du Maurier fans themselves but which enjoyed a kind of renaissance when critics started to see it as foretelling Brexit. They also purport to reconsider the image of Du Maurier as a reclusive writer removed from contemporary life in the sense that her work shows her engagement with contemporary political issues, such as gender politics at the end of the Second World War or also Cornish identity during the rise of Celtic nationalism.

17Building on comments by Alison Light and Nina Auerbach, Gina Wisker argues that Du Maurier’s horror develops from the insidious undermining of the security of both the everyday normality of life and the inner narratives by which we construct and interpret our worlds. She shows how influenced Du Maurier was not only by Gothic horror but also by existentialism and its questioning of the relationship between words and things, self and world. To that end, Wisker focuses on Rebecca and on three short stories that are emblematic of internal narratives of self-deception using liminal places where the familiar and the unfamiliar get inverted.

18Nicole Cloarec’s article deals with a lesser-known aspect of Daphne Du Maurier’s work, i.e. her foraying into the dramatic genre, and with the film adaptation of her first original play. Although partly autobiographical, The Years Between tackles an uncharacteristically topical issue, documenting the profound upheavals that World War II was bringing about in Britain as a whole. Though retaining the surprisingly bitter tone of the play at a time when VE-Day was being celebrated, the film is very much a product of producer Sidney Box and his wife Muriel, who cowrote the screenplay. Cloarec contends that, unlike other adaptations of Du Maurier’s works, the Boxes do not so much sentimentalise Du Maurier’s play as give it a feminist and socialist agenda, underscoring both the wife’s perspective and the social ramifications of Du Maurier’s drama.

19Helena Habibi’s article examines The Flight of the Falcon, one of the relatively critically neglected novels in the Du Maurier canon. After highlighting how the motif of bird-men haunts Du Maurier’s fiction, Habibi argues that this constant rewriting of the classical myth of Icarus finds its climax in this later novel, where the main characters reflect Du Maurier’s interest in Jungian symbology as well as in the “Icarus complex”, as identified by psychologist Henry A. Murray.

20For her part, Eva Leung turns to an unusual feature in Du Maurier’s fiction, namely the use of prologues and epilogues in two of her fictionalised family biographies, Hungry Hill (1943) and The Glass-Blowers (1963). She examines the plausible rationales for this narrative choice, in terms of contextualisation and characterisation, and how this aesthetic feature ultimately involves the readers. Leung concludes that far from being accidental, this narrative specificity is evidence of Du Maurier’s narrative experimentation.

21Finally, Ella Westland examines Du Maurier’s last novel, Rule Britannia, which acquired uncanny resonance in post-2016 Brexit referendum discourse. She returns the work to its own political, geographical and biographical contexts and shows that the 1960s campaign to take Britain into the European Common Market had a clear bearing on the book, as did the rise of Celtic nationalism and Daphne’s own autobiographical circumstances. Westland demonstrates that Rule Britannia actually marked a reorientation of Du Maurier’s relationship to contemporary Cornwall just as she was about to retire from writing fiction.