FICTION: Daphne by Justine Picardie Bloomsbury, 399pp. £14.99
THIS FICTIONAL STORY, based on fact, opens in 1957 with Daphne du Maurier discovering that her husband of 25 years is having an affair and a nervous breakdown. To cope, she leaves his bedside in a London nursing home, and holes up in her beloved Cornish home, Menabilly, where she immerses herself in work, embarking on a biography of Branwell Brontë, brother of the famous Brontë sisters. Du Maurier hopes to prove that Branwell's overlooked writing is of equal merit to that of his sisters and sees his biography as an opportunity to transform her own commercial success into a critical one.
Author Justine Picardie builds Daphne around an actual correspondence, discovered in the Brontë parsonage, between du Maurier and the bibliophile John Alexander Symington, whose help she sought in researching the Branwell biography. In alternating chapters, Picardie's novel follows three strands: du Maurier's story, that of Symington, and a modern-day PhD student whose obsession with du Maurier distracts her from her thesis on the Brontës.
In the first of these three stories, du Maurier, alone in Menabilly, tries to concentrate on her biography but is haunted by thoughts of her husband and his lover, memories of a possessive father, her own marital infidelities (including an affair with one of her father's mistresses) and the ghost of Rebecca, the heroine of her most famous novel. Du Maurier suffers a private breakdown. Pressure builds further when she learns that a distinguished biographer, Winifred Gérin, is also working on a study of Branwell Brontë. In order to succeed, du Maurier must beat her to publication.
Symington, the one-time curator of the Brontë Museum in Haworth, who with TJ Wise produced the Shakespeare Head edition of the Brontës' works, has evidence, by way of manuscripts containing forged signatures, that certain of Branwell's writings were falsely attributed to his sisters in order to maximise their value. Symington has two reasons to help du Maurier. Firstly, he is a champion of Branwell Brontë, having unsuccessfully tried to interest publishers in a biography himself. Secondly, he is short on cash, and du Maurier is anything but. He sells her some minor manuscripts, highlighting possible forgeries and pointing the finger at his former associate, TJ Wise. Symington is conflicted, however. Preventing him from giving her "the jewels" is his jealousy of her success and the knowledge that certain items in his personal collection have been "borrowed" from their rightful owners and not returned. Symington believes himself to be a "superior guardian" of the manuscripts. Ironically, damp is eating them away.
The third story in Daphneis a contemporary one, shadowing du Maurier's landmark novel Rebecca. The narrator is a young woman intimidated by the brilliance of her older husband's first wife, a poet. A PhD student herself, she becomes obsessed by a paper trail of Brontë manuscripts that she uncovers between du Maurier and Symington.
Picardie has done her research, following paper trails of her own and working closely with family and friends of Daphne du Maurier. Interesting facts regularly emerge in relation to the Brontë manuscripts, du Maurier's own life, and those of her cousins, the doomed Llewellyn-Davies brothers, on whom the character Peter Pan was based. Themes of loneliness, obsession and delusion are successfully explored.
However, in following the stories of three inward-looking, solitary figures who immerse themselves in the world of literature rather than face their own lives, who tell us about their relationships rather than let us see for ourselves, the book does not deliver the level of dramatic tension found in du Maurier and Brontë novels. Memories, imaginings and inner thought provide much of the narrative as characters self-consciously draw parallels between their own lives and the fictional ones that absorb them. We're left with an engaging literary canvas - but one that never fully comes to life.
Denise Deegan is a novelist. Her latest novel,Do You Want What I Want?, will be published in paperback in June by Penguin Ireland