The Guillotine: Twentieth-Century Classics That Won't Last No 44: Daphne Du Maurier

`Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again ..." There are novels whose first lines are as familiar as titles, and the one just quoted - which, as few readers will need to be informed, is that of Daphne Du Maurier's Rebecca - is still the most famous from any novel not out of literature's top drawer. Yes, it's corny and unsubtle, brazenly flaunting the novelettish strain which lurks just beneath the surface of even classic English fiction (Rebecca is as much the offspring of Mills and Boon as of Heathcliff and Cathy). Yet, as C P Snow once remarked, when he opted for David Copperfield as the very finest Dickens of all, who can argue with magic?

Well, posterity can, for one. Rebecca is unarguably one of the most magical examples of its kind, but the kind itself, popular middlebrow fiction, rarely succeeds in surviving its own era. No one, for example, who has read Beau Geste, P C Wren's best-selling romance of the Foreign Legion, will have forgotten its haunting first half-dozen pages - the dead legionnaires propped up on the ramparts of Fort Zinderneuf. But, precisely, is there anyone today under the age of 50 who has read it? Is it even in print?

Or take Anthony Hope's The Prisoner of Zenda. Its title may have entered the language, as they say, but it has certainly exited the bookshops, and this despite the fact that Hope invented an even more memorable place- name than Du Maurier's "Manderley": the novel's mittel-European setting was the original "Ruritania". Or James Hilton's now unread Lost Horizons, for which its author, in his turn, came up with a still more memorable place-name than Hope's: "Shangri-La" was his coinage.

Because no canon exists for the second- or third-rate, each generation must create its own varieties of literary populism, a process which has the inevitable effect of making the previous generation's favourites appear fusty, garrulous and unreadable. Sooner or later it's going to happen to Daphne Du Maurier, because it happens to the best no less than to the worst. It happened, after all, to her own grandfather, George, author of the superb Peter Ibbetson and Trilby, the latter of which launched yet another immortal name: its villain was, of course, "Svengali".