The Dark World of Daphne du Maurier’s Short Fiction

Did the British novelist express herself most honestly in short stories?

In a Daphne du Maurier short story, the most ordinary moment can shift to one soaked in fear.

Near the end of du Maurier’s short story “The Apple Tree,” a widower delivers firewood to the local pub and stays for a few drinks before driving home in a blinding snowstorm. His car sent sliding off the road, he abandons it and, exhausted, continues to his dark, empty house on foot. Passing his apple orchard, he stumbles and falls, “and he knew suddenly, by the sharpness of the pain biting his ankle, that what had trapped him was the jagged split stump of the old apple tree he had felled that afternoon.”

But this was no ordinary tree.

Any reader of the story will respond with a gasp, either literal or figurative, when realizing that every paragraph in the short story of psychological suspense led, in a manner both shocking and inevitable, to this outcome. The man shouts, “Let me go,” swearing and sobbing, “knowing there was no hope, no escape, until they came to find him in the morning, and supposing it was then too late, that when they came he was dead, lying stiffly in the frozen snow….”

The fiction of Daphne du Maurier is rightly celebrated. Her most famous novel is Rebecca. Since its publication in 1939, waves of successive readers have seized on the story of a young, insecure woman who meets and marries…