The book that inspired Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s cinematic romance starring Gene Tierney and Rex Harrison—one of the most passionately romantic movies ever made. • With a foreword by New York Times bestselling author Adriana Trigiani.   Burdened by debt after her husband's death, Lucy Muir insists on moving into the very cheap Gull Cottage in the quaint seaside village of Whitecliff, despite multiple warnings that the house is haunted. Upon discovering the rumors to be true, the young widow ends up forming a special companionship with the ghost of handsome former sea captain Daniel Gregg. Through the struggles of supporting her children, seeking out romance from the wrong places, and working to publish the captain's story as a book, Blood and Swash , Lucy finds in her secret relationship with Captain Gregg a comfort and blossoming love she never could have predicted.   Originally published in 1945, made into a movie in 1947, and later adapted into a television sitcom in 1968, this romantic tale explores how love can develop without boundaries, both in this life and beyond.  Vintage Movie Classics spotlights classic films that have stood the test of time, now rediscovered through the publication of the novels on which they were based. R. A. DICK was the pseudonym of Irish writer Josephine Aimee Campbell Leslie, who was also the author of The Devil and Mrs. Devine . She died in 1979. Excerpted from the Foreword They had me at Lucia . You’ve heard of pregnant women craving ice cream, burnt bacon, or green olives, but when I was expecting, I craved an old black-and-white movie from 1947 called The Ghost and Mrs. Muir. Lucy Muir (the elegant Gene Tierney) is a young widow in the early 1900s with a daughter (nine-year-old Natalie Wood) she adores, living with her suffocating in-laws, who represent the oppression of the Victorian era. Fed up, Lucy takes her small annual stipend, only child, and faithful maid and leaves. She heads for the coast, where she finds a house called Gull Cottage in the village of Whitecliff-by-the-Sea. Evidently, it has stood vacant because it’s haunted by a Captain Gregg (played by Rex Harrison) who died there in a house fire. Mr. Harrison was called “Sexy Rexy” in Old Hollywood for good reason. Apparition or not, in this picture, the actor earned every pant from the audience. I fell into this movie like a spoon into a bowl of mint chip. The Ghost and Mrs. Muir is based upon a lean Victorian novel by Josephine Leslie (who published under the name R. A. Dick in 1945 for fear of misogyny leading to no or low sales). The novel is a romantic ghost story, more novella than epic. Philip Dunne, one of the great screenwriters during the Golden Age of Hollywood, adapted the novel for the screen. Mr. Dunne was a master dramatist, keen and spare in his process. He would take apart a novel, pulling threads from it like a lacemaker. Mr. Dunne would hold on to some characters, discard others, restructure timelines, winnow down scenes, remove some altogether, and add new ones to create the most powerful screen narrative from the source material. His dialogue is smart; at the time this was a necessary talent because so were the audiences. His plots build with tension and surprise. (Another of Mr. Dunne’s brilliant screenplays is the adaptation of How Green Was My Valley, whereby he took a doorstopper of a novel and told the story in flashbacks from the point of view of the youngest son in a Welsh mining family to splendid results.) Joseph L. Mankiewicz directed with style and sensitivity. But it’s the screenwriter who makes the movie soar, as Mr. Dunne crafted the script to be as much about the art of writing and creativity as he did romantic love. Settings are always evocative and lush in a Dunne screenplay. The very British Gull Cottage built by Hollywood craftsmen was an ideal movie setting, as it invited the audience into the world of the characters. The cottage was set high on a sunny cliff overlooking the ocean, with mon- key puzzle trees in the yard, a big kitchen, massive windows, and a spacious master bedroom on the second floor with a terrace outfitted with a telescope to watch ships and stars. Okay, it was Malibu, but it looked like England through the lens of the great Charles Lang, who was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Cinematography for his work on this film. I wasn’t surprised when I read Mr. Dunne’s autobiogra- phy, Take Two, where I learned that Mr. Dunne lived with his wife and daughters high on a cliff on the California coast overlooking the ocean much like Lucy Muir. If the movie felt personal, it’s because the screenwriter knew how to make the broad scenes intimate and the setting feel like home. Mr. Dunne writes every character with specificity, no matter the size of the role. The crusty comebacks of the servant Martha (played by Edna Best) could have been considered throwaways, but in the hands of the accomplished screenwriter, they add text