Picardie is making a major contribution to the reevaluation of Daphne du Maurier

Slowly, but constantly, new reviews of Justine Picardie's Daphne (published today, August 5, in the US by Bloomsbury US). This one is by Martin Rubin in Los Angeles Times:

JUSTINE PICARDIE'S "Daphne," which focuses on Daphne du Maurier's life in crisis as she turns 50 and prepares to celebrate her silver wedding anniversary, is an engrossing and absorbing read. And as if her ability to bring to life so convincingly the eponymous heroine were not enough, Picardie's novel touches on several other worlds guaranteed to draw crowds. For who can resist the Brontes (Du Maurier is writing a biography of Charlotte, Anne and Emily's brother Branwell)? Or the Du Maurier legacy (her father, Gerald, was the leading matinee idol of his day; her grandfather, George, was the creator of Svengali in his classic novel "Trilby")? Or Du Maurier's connections to J.M. Barrie's "lost boys" who inspired "Peter Pan" (her first cousins) and the British royal family (her husband is Lt. Gen. Sir Frederick Browning, treasurer to Prince Philip)? All this -- and much more -- adds up to a delicious and piquant stew of interlocking worlds and desperate people, told with considerable panache and much psychological insight.

The novel operates on three levels. Du Maurier struggles in 1957 with her husband's nervous breakdown and subsequent retirement from Buckingham Palace after his disastrous affair with a woman she dubs "The Snow Queen." J. Alexander Symington, a seedy, defrocked Brontë curator of dubious reputation and flawed conduct, corresponds with Du Maurier, tempting her with tidbits about Branwell that turn out to be of little value despite the money he manages to extract from her. A half-century later, a young academic obsessed with -- and planning to write about -- Du Maurier studies the novelist as she struggles with her own demons in the form of a distant husband, his forbidding house and his impressive ex-wife.

This situation, of course, replicates -- but without "Rebecca's" sturm und drang -- the situation of Du Maurier's most celebrated novel; and this young woman, like its narrator, lacks a first name as she tells her tale in the first person. Artful as Picardie's homage is, these sections of the book are the novel's weakest. Perhaps she thought that readers needed them as a guide to Daphne's turmoil and Symington's desperate decline, but those parts are so electric in their capacity to attract that the plodding, pallid 21st century players seem superfluous. But no matter: with such a pathetic con man and a multifaceted character like Daphne, both superbly evoked, our cup runneth over.

The title is indeed apt, for Daphne is the heart and soul of the novel. Clearly Picardie has lived, breathed, eaten and drunk her heroine, absorbed her, analyzed her, understood her. More remarkable, she has then managed to do all these things as Daphne du Maurier in the pages of her book, investing her portrait with an authenticity that is breathtaking. To be able to capture as contradictory a character as Du Maurier -- her personality, her complicated sexuality, her artistry as a writer -- is impressive enough. But even though Picardie writes about her in the third person, she seems able to channel what she was actually like: all that passion bubbling away under the stiff upper lip of Lady Browning.

In a scene set in London's Cafe Royal, Daphne is explaining to her cousin Peter Llewellyn Davies her obsessive foray into Bronteland. He replies: "It sounds to me like you've got under Branwell's skin. Or has he got under yours?" Exactly what we see happening between Picardie and Du Maurier in these pages.

One of the benefits of the feminist revision of literary history and criticism has been to rescue talents like Du Maurier from the ghetto of those days' equivalent of chick lit, where a patronizing and obtuse male-dominated establishment had consigned them. At her best, Du Maurier produced innovative fiction packed with dramatic situations and psychological insight. (It is no accident that her fiction was the basis for two of Hitchcock's iconic films, "Rebecca" and "The Birds.") With a charismatic father she adored and whose quasi-incestuous love for her influenced her profoundly, Daphne was even more complicated as a person. Largely heterosexual, on occasion what she termed "the boy in the box" popped out, leading to serious passions for the wife of her American publisher Ellen Doubleday and the star actress Gertrude Lawrence, who had been her father's mistress. Her ability to juggle celebrity as an author, tumultuous extramarital affairs with both men and women and life as a country gentlewoman and courtier's wife hobnobbing with royalty took its toll on her inwardly, making her biography as fascinating as her fiction.

Picardie's "Daphne" will make many readers want to read Du Maurier's work, both fiction and non, most of it now reissued by Virago Press, which has also published the fascinating "The Daphne du Maurier Companion" (edited by Helen Taylor), full of information about her life and work in essays by many hands including Picardie's. Not surprisingly, she contributes an essay on "The Infernal World of Branwell Bronte," and she also writes one about "The King's General," a historical novel set in 17th century Cornwall. One way or another, Picardie is making a major contribution to the continuing upward reevaluation of Daphne du Maurier's standing in the literary world.

The Dark Knight film is a curious phenomenon in the Brontë referential newsworld. The presence of the late Heath Ledger as Joker and the inmediate association of his name with Emily Brontë's best known creation generates articles like this one in The Chronicle of Higher Education:

Then we started to talk about a book rarely discussed on Ocean Avenue: Bronte’s Wuthering Heights. It’s still the Bad Boy/Good Boy motherlode.
Heathcliff is to the Joker as Linton is to Batman. (Or to the blonde guy — whichever.)
If Heathcliff represents the raw, a la Levi-Strauss, then Linton represents the cooked. Heathcliff is destined by his very soul to be the Bad Boy; Linton, equally bound by his destiny, is the Good.
In one telling scene, Bronte shows us a very young Cathy dividing her food and attention between a fierce guard dog that has attacked her but is now gently won over to her side, and a small indoor-pet dog that is equally affectionate. It is clear that the dogs represent the two men. (Insert “duh” here.) This becomes especially clear when Cathy pinches the nose of the guard dog to hurt it slightly, but she keeps it by her. So will Cathy and Heathcliff torment each other but be unable to separate. Cathy can articulate quite clearly her attraction to Linton as well as to Heathcliff; some critics seem remarkably surprised by the very idea that she can desire two men simultaneously. She wants one man who can be both lover and husband at the same time.
She doesn’t want two men; she wants one man who can meet all her needs. “‘I wish I were a girl again, half savage and hardy, and free … and laughing at injuries, not maddening under them!‘” Cathy longs for the prelapsarian moment, the time before her fall into the world of romance, in order to escape from the decision of having to choose between the two men.
Back to Heath Ledger in The Dark Knight, and then I’ll stop: What’s fascinating is that the character of the Joker is even more complicated than the typical Heathcliff/Linton or Bad Boy/Good Boy split because he’s sort of the Bad Boy and the Bad Girl combined. We’re attracted to our own potential badness and the whole gender-confusion edge to the entire set-up. (Gina Barreca)

Do you feel like eating? The Santa Rosa Press-Democrat recommends

With more Victoriana than a Bronte novel, Madrona Manor (1001 Westside Rd. Healdsburg, 800.258.4003) is a lace and tassel wonderland for lovers.

The New Zealand Herald talks about 'pruning your literary wardrobe':

In the same way Carrie Bradshaw would never leave behind her favourite Choos and Blahniks, I could no more abandon Jane Eyre, Jane Austen and my out-of-print Helene Hanffs to make way for newer acquisitions. I did toss out all those doorstopper-size aeroplane reads as quickly as last year's zebra prints. As I did The Jane Austen Book Club by Karen Joy Fowler; I mean, yes it's clever, but why bother with a knock-off when the originals are just so good? (...) Clearly - and fortunately - fiction and fashion are not quite the same. (Charlotte Evans)

Let's congratulate soprano Phyllis Curtin (picture source), creator of the role of Cathy in Carlisle Floyd's Wuthering Heights 1958 opera, who is one of the West Virginia Music Hall of Fame 2008 Inductees:

The West Virginia Music Hall of Fame announced its second class of inductees at a press conference Tuesday in the Great Hall of the Cultural Center in the Capitol Complex.
The musicians to be inducted in the living category are Wilma Lee and Stoney Cooper, Phyllis Curtin, Robert Drasnin, The Lilly Brothers and Don Stover, and Charlie McCoy. (The Virginia State Journal)

Old Fogey posts about Charlotte Brontë and Madame de Staël's shared - erm - 'lack of understanding' of Jane Austen. Liquid Dreams Of... talks about Emma Tennant's Heathcliff's Tale and Rosalind Whitman's Black & White in Wuthering Heights etchings. My Space has read and liked Jane Eyre.

Categories: Books, Illustrations, Jane Eyre, Music, Opera, References, Sequels, Wuthering Heights