Daphne Du Maurier published a novelized story of her family in 1937, at the age of thirty. Before that, she managed to write a biography of her father, the English actor and entrepreneur Gerald Du Maurier, and four novels. The writer was on the verge of fame: the novel “The Jamaica Inn” had already been published, and just a year later, “Rebecca”, her main world bestseller, would be published. Plunging into the atmosphere of Europe of the nineteenth century, the writer recreates the life of her Anglo-French ancestors - from her great-great-grandmother, mistress of the Duke of York, before her grandfather, the famous novelist and artist George Du Maurier. “The story is full of tumultuous events and terrible blows of fate - a missing husband here, a scandal and a trial there - but they are all presented in the form of a romantic comedy and are incredibly entertaining,” as the foreword to the English edition says. Daphne Du Maurier always enthusiastically explored the characters and destinies of people, the mysterious threads by which the present is connected with the past, invariably discovering “ghosts everywhere - not pale phantoms rattling chains through eternity... creaking floorboards in empty houses, but cheerful shadows of the past”... For the first time in Russian !