Doyenne of the dark arts Daphne du Maurier serves up deliciously scary Halloween stories

Fiction

Daphne du Maurier photographed at her home in Cornwall, circa 1977. Photo: Getty

Daphne du Maurier is, for my money, the most underrated writer of all time. Which is not to say, exactly, that she was the greatest, only that, by a straightforward ­metric of “quality versus critical appreciation”, her work has been undervalued more than ­anyone else’s.

Du Maurier was and ­remains hugely popular with the public: an automatic black mark with the cultural gatekeepers. And she mostly wrote genre fiction – horror, thriller, ghost story, ­Gothic melodrama, romance, a smidgeon of sci-fi – an even blacker mark.

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