Auerbach examines the writer of depth and recklessness now largely known
only as the author of Rebecca, looking at the way her sharp-edged
fiction, with its brutal and often perverse family relationships, has
been softened in film adaptations of her work. She reads both du
Maurier's life in her writings, and the sensibility of a vanished class
and time that haunts the fringes of our own age.