Daphne
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- $18.99
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- $18.99
Publisher Description
A love story and a literary mystery - a true story of Daphne du Maurier
'A divine treat for lovers of literary mysteries' The Times
'Compulsively readable ... elegant and absorbing ... Daphne takes the reader on a journey of undiluted pleasure' Spectator
It is 1957. As Daphne du Maurier wanders alone through her remote mansion on the Cornish coast, she is haunted by thoughts of her failing marriage and the legendary heroine of her most famous novel, Rebecca, who now seems close at hand.
Seeking distraction, she becomes fascinated by Branwell, the reprobate brother of the Brontë sisters, and begins a correspondence with the enigmatic scholar Alex Symington in which truth and fiction combine.
Meanwhile, in present day London, a lonely young woman struggles with her thesis on du Maurier and the Brontës and finds herself retreating from her distant husband into a fifty-year-old literary mystery...
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Former BritishVogue editor Picardie (My Mother's Wedding Dress) gives us a fictional life of Rebecca novelist Daphne du Maurier (1907 "1989) that founders in obsession. In the late 1950s, du Maurier, determined to establish herself as a serious writer, researched and wrote a biography of Branwell Bront , the often-overlooked real-life brother of sisters Emily and Charlotte. Flash forward to the present, in which a nameless graduate student seeks out lost secrets about the relationship between du Maurier and John Alexander Symington, the Bront expert and curator to whom du Maurier dedicated her eventual Bront book. Picardie's novel quickly becomes a tangle of redundancies, as the student, in one plot line, grows increasingly obsessed with du Maurier and loses touch with reality. Meanwhile, in another thread, du Maurier and Symington both flirt with madness in their separate Branwell quests. Du Maurier's fictional characters, especially Rebecca, haunt the story unproductively, as do the Bront s, Bront protagonists, and Barrie's Peter Pan and the Lost Boys (who were inspired by du Maurier's cousins). Picardie does best with Symington, whose career ended in scandal: she portrays his dissolution coldly, letting observations rip in a way she never quite manages with the fictive Daphne.
