Hungry Hill

Underrated and nearly forgotten, perhaps with the exception of English Literature students, many of Daphne Du Maurier's works are gathering dust. As it happened by coincidence on a holiday in Glengariff in West Cork, my husband mentioned he had seen a Daphne Du Maurier in quite a lot of the local shops, even the grocery stores. I hadn't heard of Du Maurier's Hungry Hill, so I bought it and read it. She rises to the occasion, and is able to give a credible interpretation of the tensions between the dispossessed Anglo-Irish, dispossessed for they are neither one thing or the other; and the dispossessed Irish, the locals who see their land used to line the pockets of the Anglo-Irish landowners.Du Mauier's work, apart from being a gripping tale and worthy of being tuned into a TV costume drama, illustrates her perceptiveness of human nature and her ability to tell us what's going on inside her characters heads credibly and sympathetically. Its a classic as far as I am concerned, as it could even today give us insights into how some young men's brains work; this from a woman who was written off as a light weight romantic novelist. Her only fault in the book was to barely mention the Irish Famine.;