Daphne Du Maurier

DDM , who published throughout the middle years of the twentieth century, was primarily a novelist, though she wrote non-fiction—biography, plays, and screenplays—as well. Her work was adapted into film and television by such esteemed people and organizations as Alfred Hitchcock and the BBC . Nevertheless critical opinion of her filmed work has not been high. Because two romance novels, Rebecca and Frenchman's Creek, were DDM 's best-loved and most-remembered works, she struggled, without success, to prove her literary worth outside that genre for the rest of her career. She is often thought of as writing primarily for women, though she frequently used the male voice, and evidently felt at home in it.