An Inert Slab of Review and a Rum Concoction

Peter Parker reviews (?) Justine Picardie's Daphne in The Times:

In the late-1950s, Daphne du Maurier began work on a biographical study of Branwell Brontë in the hope of establishing herself as a writer that the critical establishment would take seriously. She dedicated her book to the scholar JA Symington, from whom she had bought various manuscripts, some of which had been fraudulently attributed to her subject’s more famous sisters by the crook and forger TJ Wise. Symington had been the curator and librarian of the Brontë Parsonage Museum and the Brotherton Collection, but was dismissed from both posts after various items went missing.
In Justine Picardie’s novel, a strenuously contrived secondary narrative, concerning a young woman carrying out research into the Brontës for a PhD, has been bolted on to the far more interesting story of du Maurier and Symington. As we are frequently reminded, this unnamed woman’s personal circumstances echo those of the nameless heroine of du Maurier’s most famous novel, Rebecca. Like the author’s, her marriage is in difficulties and she shares her sexual ambivalence, but she remains a cipher. Forgery, theft, adultery, lesbianism, incest and suicide ought to provide plenty of scope for fiction, but this misconceived book never really comes to life.
Although Picardie is capable of the occasional deft touch (“There’s nothing like being lectured on Henry James by one’s husband to put you off both of them”), much of the book appears to have been written on autopilot, its situations and prose equally hackneyed. It is the sort of novel in which people talk aloud to portraits and photos and have “illuminating” dreams. Mistresses are expected to sport “blood-red talons”, and copies of the TLS containing unwelcome headlines about rival biographies are thrown down with force. In order to clear their minds, people stride off into the countryside – though if du Maurier is “hoping to be soothed by the wild anemones in the woods” in November, she is in for a long wait.
Far too many sentences and paragraphs end with a row of dots. These don’t indicate interruptions or omissions, but are a crude typographical shorthand intended to add “significance” or “tension”. Those parts of the book devoted to du Maurier and Symington, meanwhile, suffer the usual faults of fiction about real people, notably characters telling each other things they already know because the reader may not. Thus, in a letter to du Maurier, Symington has to identify Arthur Bell Nicholls as Charlotte Brontë’s widower, something of which his correspondent, “a keen member of the Brontë Society”, is unlikely to have been unaware.
The need to keep readers informed also provides several catastrophically false notes, as when du Maurier’s cousin Peter Llewelyn Davies talks to her about “Jim Barrie”. As this inattentively edited novel later states, JM Barrie “had always been Uncle Jim to [du Maurier] and her sisters, just as he was to her cousins”, and they certainly wouldn’t have referred to “Jim Barrie” in conversation with each other. Famous published remarks about Peter Pan are regurgitated as dialogue, and anyone who knows Llewelyn Davies’s eventual fate will groan inwardly when a depressed du Maurier stands on the platform of Sloane Square Underground station “thinking how easy it would be to jump in front of the next train”.
Picardie has clearly undertaken considerable research into her potentially fascinating biographical story, raising all manner of worthwhile questions about the integrity of writers, collectors and manuscripts. It is therefore all the more regrettable that instead of writing a factual account she has produced this baggy, repetitive and inert slab of pseudo-fiction.

As we said a couple of days ago, we are currently immersed in Daphne, which means we don't have absolute power (yet!) to disqualify this review, but we'd like to caution our readers against it all the same. The points the reviewer picks on are obviously out of context and most of them can easily be smoothed away by reading the book. For instance, when Daphne and Peter Llewellyn Davies refer to 'Uncle Jim' as 'Jim Barrie' they are referring to the author in his literary context, just as Daphne du Maurier refers to her father alternatively as Gerald - when she is not strictly speaking of him as just her father - or Daddy.

Much more balanced is this other review by Mark Bostridge in The Independent:

Justine Picardie's new novel, Daphne, is a rum concoction which comes wrapped in one of the most attractive jacket designs, based on an illustration by Alison Lang, that I've seen in a long time. As the book opens, we encounter the writer Daphne du Maurier, 50 years old and at a particularly low point in her life. Her husband, Tommy "Moper" Browning, is recovering from a breakdown, brought on by drink and his affair with the woman Daphne calls "The Snow Queen". At Menabilly, her Cornish home, Daphne is consumed by regret, and haunted by the ghostly presence of her most famous fictional creation, Rebecca.
To combat her feelings of desolation, Daphne immerses herself in the book she is trying to write, a biography of Branwell Brontë. She enlists the scholarly help of J A Symington, an editor of the Brontës' writings and a collector of their manuscripts. But is Symington as trustworthy and respectable as his reputation suggests? And can Daphne rescue Branwell from the century of belittlement he has suffered at the hands of his sisters' admirers, and bring evidence of his true genius to the fore?
Picardie's novel is buttressed by an impressive amount of research, so much so that one sometimes wishes that she'd concentrated on a non-fictional treatment of her major themes. As background, she has been guided by Margaret Forster's 1993 biography of Daphne du Maurier, and by the host of other critical and biographical writing about du Maurier which has accompanied the swift revival of interest in her life and work since her death in 1989. She's also investigated the tangled web surrounding the dispersal of Brontë manuscripts, and the sale of some of Branwell's writings with forged signatures in Charlotte's or Emily's name to ensure a better price. Symington's involvement is murky here. In the 1920s, he was instrumental in shaping the Brontë collections at both the University of Leeds and at the new Brontë Parsonage Museum at Haworth. But in 1930, Symington left the Brontë Society under a cloud, after it was discovered that various prized items were missing from the museum.
Picardie creates a convincing portrait of Symington in the most assured sections of the novel. Like the other major Brontë collectors with whom he was involved, T J Wise and Clement Shorter, Symington was a self-made man, conscious of his humble beginnings, and prepared to stray into nefarious practices if a precious manuscript was in his reach. His relationship with du Maurier, she burdened by feelings of inadequacy but wanting to write something "serious", he in awe of her fame, but increasingly unable to separate the truth from the imaginary as he looks back over his past, is very nicely done.
Much less successful is a sub-plot, set in the present, in which a latter-day PhD student becomes absorbed in Daphne's 50-year-old quest for Branwell, partly as a defence against her husband's continuing obsession with his first wife, Rebecca. Here the plotline of secret meetings and stolen letters barely limps along, while the clunky parallels with du Maurier's Rebecca are wholly devoid of the light, transforming touch that they need.
Unfortunately, the novel can't help but end on an anti-climactic note. Despite all the effort that du Maurier put into her research, her resulting biography about Branwell Brontë hardly helped to restore his reputation, concluding that Branwell had exhausted all his literary talent by the time he reached 21. Picardie has Daphne fearing that she may have succeeded in killing off Branwell, smothering him within the pages of her book.

More of our insights into the book will appear here shortly, but please don't believe everything you read - just read for yourself.

Categories: Books