Missing is the menace of the original, and I use this word thoughtfully. “The Menace,” du Maurier explains in her short story of the same title, “in movie language, and especially among women, means a heart-throb, a lover, someone with wide shoulders and no hips.” It’s a term that, for her, referred to sexual attraction – “being ‘menaced,’” du Maurier’s biographer Margaret Forster explains, “was being attracted by another person.” This take on sexual allure, as something tinged with a frisson of danger and threat, lies at the heart of Philip’s attraction to Rachel: evidence suggests Rachel murdered her husband Ambrose, Philip’s beloved uncle. Are his suspicions justified? Is she guilty or innocent? The reader, like Philip, is never quite sure.

Du Maurier excelled at evoking a sense of menace. Darkness comes to the fore in her macabre and chilling short stories, but also twists through each of her novels. However, all too often she’s dismissed as a writer of benign historical romances. Michell’s struggle to capture the terror embedded in My Cousin Rachel – and his inability to reach beyond the obvious period drama angle – is indicative of a widespread misreading of du Maurier’s work. As the film critic David Thomson acknowledges, “the romance often veers towards something more like horror” – though the latter element is all too often overlooked.

A prolific writer, du Maurier’s career spanned from the beginning of the 1930s to her death, at the age of 81, in 1989. As well as novels – 16 in total – she also wrote short stories, plays, biographies, a memoir, and books about her beloved Cornwall, where she made her home for many years and where many of her books are set.