SOURCE: "The Breaking Point 1946-1960" and "Death of the Writer 1960-1989," in Daphne du Maurier: The Secret Life of the Renowned Storyteller, Doubleday, 1993, pp. 205-312, 313-416.

Forster is an English novelist, biographer, and critic. In the following excerpt from her authorized biography of du Maurier, she examines the stories collected in The Apple Tree.

[In the winter of 1949, Daphne] wrote a new collection of short stories [The Apple Tree] which were a completely new departure. These were strange, morbid stories, in which deep undercurrents of resentment and even hatred revealed far more about Daphne's inner fantasy life than any novel had ever done. ('All those stories have inner significance for problems of that time,' she later wrote.) They included a novella, Monte Verita, which completely bewildered Victor Gollancz [du Maurier's publisher], who commented: 'I don't understand the slight implication that there is something wrong with sex.'...