SOURCE: "Imitation Gothic," in Times Literary Supplement, No. 4724, October 15, 1993, p. 19.

In the review of Mrs. de Winter below, Kemp complains that Hill's imitation of Daphne du Maurier's narrative style "is unstirred by any imaginative power."

In recent years, Susan Hill has taken to the literary equivalent of manufacturing reproduction furniture. With The Woman in Black and The Mist in the Mirror, she turned out a pair of antique-look ghost tales, modelled on M. R. James prototypes but also incorporating chunks of replica Dickens and Wilkie Collins. Now she is engaged in marketing another line of imitation: Mrs de Winter, her latest fictional commodity, is a simulated sequel to Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca.

Other than commercially, emulating that 1938 bestseller would be a profitless task, you'd think, and so it very soon proves. When the story starts—twelve years on from the fateful night Manderley went up in flames—Mrs...