Daphne by Justine Picardie

If you have looked closely at our sidebar lately you will have noticed at least one new addition to the forthcoming books: Daphne by Justine Picardie (author of My Mother's Wedding Dress and the preface to the recent edition of Daphne du Maurier's The Infernal World of Branwell Brontë).

Bloomsbury describes it as follows:

It is 1957. The author Daphne du Maurier, beautiful, famous, despairing as her marriage falls apart, finds herself haunted by Rebecca, the heroine of her most
famous novel, written twenty years earlier.
Resolving to write herself out of her misery, Daphne becomes passionately interested in Branwell Bronte, the reprobate brother of the Bronte sisters, and begins a correspondence with Alex Symington, an enigmatic Bronte scholar and bibliophile, as she researches a biography. But behind Symington’s respectable scholarly surface is a slippery character with much to hide, and Daphne becomes embroiled in a literary mystery where truth and fiction become indistinguishable.
Half a century later, a young woman tries to untangle the story of du Maurier, Symington and the Brontes, and in doing so, begins to make sense of her own shadowy history.
Daphne is a story of obsession and possession; of stolen manuscripts and forged signatures; of love lost, and love found; of the way into imaginary worlds, and the way out of them.

Very interesting. But - alas - not published until May 2008 (!). However, you can start killing time by reading this entry we have read on a blog today.

Oh, and Symington was a real person -he became a persona non grata to the Brontë Society members council in the 1930s for his dubious practices.

Details:

Daphne by Justine Picardine
Price £17.99
This book is not yet published.
Available 5 May 2008 (subject to change).
Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN 9780747587026
Format Book 234x153 mm.

Categories: Books, Branwell Brontë