![]() ![]() ![]() The rare “good” character seldom achieves any kind of reward or happy ending, while many of the nasty ones do quite well for themselves. There is rarely love in the pages though there’s plenty of lust, desire and rather sordid infidelity. Her women are either weak and ripe to be victims, or they are manipulative, cruel and cold. ![]() There is, I feel, a kind of cruelty towards the characters – they start out miserable, go through hell, and come out worse than they began not in every case, but often enough for me to have remarked several times in my contemporaneous notes that she really doesn’t seem to like people, especially women. But what really put me off the collection was the almost complete lack of likeable characters. ![]() In general I found them rather unoriginal, often padded and repetitive to a length far longer than the story justified, with “twists” that were all too obvious. I feel that shows – these are not her best work, with some of them ranking as pretty poor, in my opinion. Although this was apparently the last collection of short stories to be published in du Maurier’s lifetime, most of the fourteen stories in it date from her early twenties, with only a handful from later in her career. ![]()
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