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When Daphne du Maurier died at age 81 in 1989 at her home in her beloved Cornwall, England, obituary writers around the world sharpened their pencils. A writer in the London Times called her "one of the most popular novelists in the English-speaking world," with works that "became best sellers . . . almost automatically both in this country and in the United States." The same obituary writer noted that du Maurier "had a natural gift both for the evocation of atmosphere and for the maintenance of suspense . . . she trafficked in dreams, dreams of a kind that seem to be inherent in the unconscious minds of many women, indeed of many men." Her best known novels, including Jamaica Inn, Rebecca, Frenchman's Creek, The Scapegoat, My Cousin Rachel, and The House on the Strand, "represent two classes into which her fiction falls, the cloak-and-dagger romance on the one hand and the Gothic novel on the other." Sarah Booth Conroy, writing in the Washington Post, also noted du Maurier's ability to lead "enchanted readers into a dream world, endowing them with fantastic abilities to become specters/spectators in strange lives, and for the space of her tales, to dwell in wonderfully wayward places." Conroy further commented, "Eagerly, insatiably, hundreds of thousands of us followed her down the drive to Rebecca's Manderley, Frenchman's Creek, The House on the Strand, Jamaica Inn and other elusive spaces in 13 bestselling novels, many short stories and seven classic movies." Writing in the Sunday Times, Margaret Forster, who would later publish a biography of du Maurier, singled out Rebecca as a "seminal work for the post-war generation, just as Jane Eyre was for mid-Victorians." She also praised the movies made by Alfred Hitchcock of that novel and of her short story, "The Birds," which "showed how scarifying effects could be underpinned by a psychological strength in the text." Forster concluded her laudatory appraisal of du Maurier's creative life: "If all our popular bestsellers were of her excellence then there would be no need to deplore their existence, and the silly snobbery existing between 'pulp' fiction and literary fiction would vanish."
Literary value versus escapist fiction has always been at the crux of the du Maurier debate.
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