CONTRADICTORY messages about women and a plot leaving a hundred questions unanswered has been an enduring recipe for Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca, which has never been out of print since its 1938 publication.

Ex-magazine editor Sally Beauman and author of a new sequel, Rebecca's Tale, was joined at the Cheltenham Literary Festival on Saturday by literary critics, Elaine Showalter and Helen Taylor, to discuss the fascination with Rebecca.

The discussion highlighted the complexities of du Maurier, who in Rebecca sets out a glamorous, dark anti-heroine whose life and death has become the fascination of the second, insipid Mrs de Winter.

Ms Beauman said: "I wonder how much writing in 1938 affected Daphne du Maurier. She had a very strange and sad belief that to be a writer as a woman was somehow wrong. She felt she had to be a conformist wife and mother as her husband expected her to be. The second Mrs de Winter is inept as she herself could be in that respect."

Set up like an edition of the Late Show, discussion highlighted feminist and gender issues in Rebecca, issues Ms Beauman explores in her sequel. The interesting debate compelled the audience again to Rebecca, to Alfred Hitchcock's film of the novel and to the life of the bisexual, Cornish author.

Ally Hardy