Justine Picardie

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I was intrigued by the premise behind Justine Picardie’s new novel Daphne from the moment I first heard her talking about it on the radio two or three Sunday’s ago. Like most women of my generation, I read Daphne du Maurier’s novels as a teenager and a quick check showed there to be still five very well thumbed volumes on my shelf. What I hadn’t read, however, was her biography The Infernal show more World of Branwell Bronte, which is central to Picardie’s re-imagining of a crucial time in du Maurier’s life, a time when her own personal relationships and grip on reality are threatened in a way similar to that of the man about whom she is trying to write. Not that this meant I came to the novel unaware of the background to the life that so absorbs both du Maurier and Picardie’s unnamed contemporary narrator. I lived for three years only a matter of miles from the Bronte home in Haworth and there is a wonderful book for children by Pauline Clarke, The Twelve and the Genii which explores the childhood of the Bronte children and which I’ve always made sure was in any library I’ve organised. So, when the main characters in each of the three strands of this book become more and more absorbed in trying to unravel the various claims to authorship amongst the siblings and question whether or not any of the works attributed to his sisters might in fact have been written by Branwell I knew what the main points at issue were.
Branwell Bronte has always been a shadowy figure haunting the lives of his better known sisters. Common wisdom has it that he was a ne’er-do-well and a drunkard, a man whose dissolute life led him to waste the creative potential that as a child was as strong in him as it was in Charlotte, Emily and Anne. Over the years, however, various scholars have tried to show that there was more to the story than this and the two most closely interwoven narrative strands of Daphne concern the 1950s’ correspondence between du Maurier and the scholarly Alex Symington as Daphne tries to bring together the material for her book and forge an argument that shows Branwell in a better light. The third strand takes place in the present day and centres around a young woman who is looking to write her doctoral thesis on Branwell and who becomes more and more obsessed with the evidence that she believes du Maurier to have discovered and with the author herself.
And that is where Picardie’s book starts to become really interesting because as well as exploring the relationship between du Maurier and Symington and the steps by which Daphne came to her final conclusions about Branwell’s authorship, she is also, I think, considering the question of identity in a much deeper manner and specifically the boundary between real and fictional identity. How does a writer keep themselves separate from their characters? How does a reader walk the narrow line between empathy and identification where a favourite fictional personna is concerned?
The most obvious working out of this idea comes in the form of Daphne’s Llewelyn_Davies cousins, J.M Barrie’s lost boys, the original models for Peter Pan. Their life-long struggle to escape from the unwanted notoriety that this brought has been well documented and here is reflected on in discussions between Daphne and the cousin to whom she is closest, Peter. It is also there in the exploration of Daphne's own life and the way in which she is haunted by her most famous creation, Rebecca. In many ways she sees herself as the intruder in her home of Menabilly and this feeling is only enhanced by the threat that she knows her marriage to be under and the relative sophistication of ‘the other woman’, here likened to the Snow Queen , but nevertheless , still a Rebecca-like character. Most clearly though it is there in the un-named narrator who, when we first meet her, has just become the second wife of an older man and been taken to live in a house that still identifies in every way with her more sophisticated and worldly wise predecessor, Rachel. There is little wonder that she begins to cross the lines between reality and fiction and finds herself living out the same patterns of behaviour as du Maurier’s nameless heroine.
I don’t suppose that there is a single ‘real’ reader who hasn’t at some time imagined themselves into the life of their favourite character. Which of us hasn’t been Jo March or Anne Shirley? My mother once nervously inquired of me, “You do know Harry Potter isn’t real, don’t you?” Goodness only knows what she thought I was going to do; turn a particularly difficult colleague into a bouncing ferret? (Now there’s an idea!) But, what is happening here is far less healthy. It is not a momentary fantasy; it is a loss of self that threatens and sometimes overcomes the balance of a stable mind. It is a point of entry into a world of shadows, a world where we can feel so much more than we are and which can then lead to a complete inability to deal with the reality of our actual existence. It is a world like that which Branwell created with his sisters when they were children and from which he was perhaps never able to satisfactorily return. To some extent Daphne and Symington are both caught in worlds of their own creation. The third narrator is threatened in a similar way and her ultimate fate is made clear only in the final pages of Picardie’s excellent novel.
I was completely engrossed by this book. I would have read it at one sitting had that been possible and that is most unusual for me. I haven’t read any of the writer’s previous work but that is now definitely a priority. And, I’ll go back to du Maurier as well. I want to read the book that inspired Daphne. show less

I went into this book with some trepidation: two of the Brontes and one of the du Mauriers are on my top 15 writers list, and I was concerned that a fictionalized account of Daphne du Maurier's work on a biography of Branwell Bronte would just make me angry. The story is told through three points of view: du Maurier while researching the book, J.A. Symington (Bronte expert) during the same time, and a modern-day PhD candidate researching du Maurier researching Bronte.

First, the modern-day show more story: it's like a combination of a very intentional "Rebecca" tribute/knockoff (there is even a strong, impressive first wife named Rachel and a wimpy second wife aka the PhD candidate) and an academic mystery (think "Possession" and the search for the missing manuscript, Emily Bronte's poetry notebook in this case). Like all of these stories, two people search for the same manuscript which is ultimately found by the more minor character resulting in an academic coup and a dissertation that goes straight to a book deal and, of course, getting the guy.
Oh wait! No, that isn't how the story ends! Which rescued the book for this reviewer. I was fully expecting the cliched ending almost up to the very end, and was delighted when it turned out to have a much more original ending (for this type of book, anyway). Picardie even tells us the unnamed narrator's name in the very last chapter! Something du Maurier didn't even do!

The flashbacks to du Maurier are very interesting. I don't know how much is fictional, event-wise, but I'm guessing not much since Picardie falls all over herself in the credits thanking the du Maurier children for all of their help. Plus, I didn't know all that about the Bronte's manuscripts (I'm being deliberately vague - you'll have to read it yourself!)

In short, this book is a great read, and will be particularly enjoyed by anyone who, like me, is a huge Daphne du Maurier fan and a huge Bronte fan. show less

This book features revolves around three characters, these being Daphne Du Maurier during the late 1950s, when she is facing problems in her personal life, and struggling to write a biography of Branwell Bronte (brother of Charlotte, Emily and Anne); Bronte scholar J. Alex Symington, who like Daphne, is fascinated by the life of Branwell Bronte, and who corresponds with her about the Branwell biography; and an unnamed young woman in the present day, who is preoccupied with Daphne Du Maurier, show more and who is unhappily married to a much older man, and is haunted by thoughts of his first wife Rachel.

The book is eloquently written, and Picardie clearly meticulously researched her subject. It is something of a literary mystery, as Du Maurier attempts to prove whether or not some of Branwell’s work was credited to Charlotte or Emily Bronte, and it also becomes apparent that Symington’s career with the Bronte society ended in disgrace as he was accused of stealing Bronte manuscripts during his time as curator of the Bronte Museum. This is all based on real life events, and did make for fascinating reading. Although it is a fictionalised account of this time in Daphne Du Maurier’s life, her problematic marriage, and her desire to be seen by the critics who dismiss her talents, as more than just a best selling novelist were all too real. For his part, Symington was not a particularly likeable character, and as his story is told, he is revealed to be an unreliable source of information. For all that however, it was hard not to have some sympathy with him, trapped as he was by his misdeeds in the past, which he is able to justify to himself but to nobody else.

I also enjoyed the modern day narrative, which is the only one told in the first person. There are some none too subtle similarities with Du Maurier’s ‘Rebecca’ – the unnamed narrator being the timid second wife of her older and more worldly husband, the obsession with her husband’s first wife, and the narrator’s feelings of loneliness and isolation. In fact, this entire narrative could have been cut out of the book, without it affecting the stories of Du Maurier and Symington, but it made for enjoyable reading, particularly where the narrator started to research Du Maurier and her connection with the Brontes.

I would say that some prior knowledge of both Daphne Du Maurier’s books and the works of Charlotte and Emily Bronte would be advantageous before reading this book, as several references are made to them. (incidentally, Anne Bronte barely gets a mention in this book, although she was herself an acclaimed novelist.) Reading it certainly made me want to discover more about tDu Maurier’s life.

Overall, I found the book absorbing, but the individual crisis that each main character is facing made it a dispiriting read at times. That said, I would still highly recommend it for Bronte and (especially) Du Maurier enthusiasts. show less

I took up this book with trepidation, after being horribly disappointed in Joanna Challis's mystery featuring Daphne du Maurier as a sleuth. Happily, I can report that far from being a dud, it's an above-average novel and a great "hommage" to du Maurier.

The book weaves together three separate stories, each revolving around a character facing a crisis in their life. Two are in the past, and feature real people, du Maurier and Bronte scholar J. Alexander Symington; the third is a contemporary show more young woman struggling with an ill-advised marriage and too fascinated with the middlebrow du Maurier to focus on her plans to write a PhD thesis about the Brontes. All three characters must confront their demons -- Daphne, her troubled marriage and her pain at being critically shunned even as her books become bestsellers; Symington, his past misdeeds as curator of Bronte collections and Daphne's demands on his expertise as she struggles to complete the biography that will become known as The Infernal World of Branwell Bronte and the contemporary first-person narrator's bid for some kind of independence and connection with the broader world.

Picardie has managed to capture a bit of what makes du Maurier's novels so atmospheric -- her 21st century narrator is an unnamed character who, like the second Mrs. deWinter, must live in the shadow of a previous spouse about whom her husband will say nothing, leading the new bride to make her own uncomfortable discoveries. Meanwhile, the young woman becomes hypnotized by the past, yearning
"to slip into an old photograph or between the printed lines of a page; to become a bystander in the past, to see it as it really was rather than as it has been seen in retrospect.”

For more of my review, and my thoughts on the idea of a literary "hommage", see my blog post here: http://uncommonreading.blogspot.com/2011/06/perils-of-literary-hommage.html show less