Auerbach's Daphne du Maurier is the author of sixteen other novels, along with biographies, articles, plays, memoirs, and short stories. Where other readers have become absorbed by Rebecca, Auerbach finds greater fascination in novels such as The Scapegoat, Hungry Hill, and My Cousin Rachel, books whose protagonists are troubled, even murderous, men succumbing to the haunting of previous generations. Du Maurier herself was haunted by her father and grandfather. Living under the shadow of her famous father, Gorald, actor and manager of Wyndham's Theater and creator of the role of Captain Hook in Peter Pan, and of her grandfather George, the popular illustrator and best-selling novelist of Trilby, du Maurier was the torchbearer of a stellar male line. Her own phrase for her secret self, "the boy in the box, " hints at her sexual ambivalence and her alienation from the prescribed roles for women of her day.

This is a du Maurier whose sharp-edged fiction, with its brutal and often perverse family relationships, has been softened in such movies as Rebecca, Jamaica Inn, The Birds, and Don't Look Now, all based on her work. Auerbach reads both du Maurier's life in her writings, and the sensibility of a vanished class and time that is now gone but which haunts the fringes of our own age.