Yikes - wouldn't have expected to see Jilly Cooper and Josephine Tey linked quite that way.

As I just said in my reply above, I'm wondering when the line between 'artistic influence' and outright plagiarism came to be drawn at about the place it's generally accepted to be these days. And though I'm not disagreeing with you about the influence, I actually managed to construct a quite plausible way in which there could have been so many similarities between the two books even if Montgomery hadn't read Rebecca. The more I read about them, the more I see how the writers of 'girls' stories' were totally immersed in this culture (both literary and non-) of discussion about girls, childhood and the process of growing into womanhood. Ack - must stop and write about this topic on the essay!