Reading is a dangerous and expensive past time. Read a book and discover that you know very little about its content and characters but are fascinated by them, and immediately find yourself searching book lists to find reference books, biographies and more information about what you have just read; read a book containing multiple reference to people, places and events that you already know and love, but perhaps have not looked at recently, off you go again, more books, more reading, more re-discovery. So, dangerous and expensive it is.
Daphne by Justine Picardie will fall into one of the above categories depending on your knowledge of the Du Mauriers and the Brontes. My knowledge of the former is fairly sketchy though as I read on I realised I knew perhaps more than I thought; my knowledge of the latter is of greater depth as I have been a Bronte aficionado since I first read Jane Eyre at the tender age of ten. Didn't understand half of it of course, but that did not stop me from finding it totally overwhelming.
Fast forward years later and I read Rebecca and the similarities with Jane Eyre struck me then and have stayed with me since. One day I was scrabbling amongst heaps of books in an old second hand book shop in Charing Cross Road and came across The Infernal World of Branwell Bronte by Daphne du Maurier and brought it home. It was a hard back, probably one of the first printing with a pretty good jacket, where it is now I have no idea. I have carted books with me through marriages, divorces, downsizing, upsizing, storage and unpacking and somewhere along the way some have gone missing, including this one much to my annoyance as I would have given my eye teeth to have it near me when 
reading Justine's book. I have now ordered another copy but I know the new paperback edition will lack the slightly musty charm of my original. No matter. I have also ordered Margaret Forster's biography of Daphne so already I have expended some more of my credit on my card after reading Daphne. I am, therefore, very grateful that Justine was kind enough to send me a copy, this offer arrived the day before I was about to send off another Amazon order including the aforementioned book so perfect timing...
So, we have Daphne, on the edge of what sounds like a nervous breakdown, in Menabilly, researching a possible biography of Branwell Bronte, the misfit and ruinous son of the Bronte parsonage. There have always been rumours and theories that Branwell was the author of Wuthering Heights, not Emily, or at least had a hand in it, and this is the sort of Bronte byway which is totally fascinating to the enthusiast and which can also become an obsession. Daphne is in touch with A J Symington, who was expelled from the Bronte Society on suspicion of stealing manuscripts, including a notebook containing Emily's poems, and who is as determined as she is to find an undiscovered link somewhere in the archives, letters and writings of the Brontes, which will prove that Branwell's genius equalled that of his sisters. J A Symington has spent his life immured in his studies and has lost touch with reality and the outside world, including his family, as he gradually becomes overwhelmed with the endless minutiae of studying papers, following up clues, struggling to make sense of the massive amount of facts and references available to him. He plans a book on Branwell which is never finished, never even started (shades of Mr Causabon in Middlemarch here and his Key to the Mythologies which he researched all his life and could never collate) and, while Daphne actually completed a biography of Branwell, it is pretty clear that at times she, too, was struggling. The Brontes have that effect on their scholars. I do not claim to be such, but when I was in the full flow of my Bronte fanaticism back in the 60s and 70s, I visited Haworth regularly, read everything I could lay my hands on, joined the Bronte Society for a spell (left after a while when I found, rather disconcertingly, that several members who I met at the Annual Meeting all thought they were reincarnations of Emily and they all had an odd gleam in the eye. Decided that danger lay ahead so resigned), wandered over the moors and found myself totally immersed in their lives.
My fascination with this family has never dimmed and, therefore, it was with great anticipation and enjoyment I came to this book. The third strand of the story, that of a student writing her thesis on Daphne du Maurier and the Brontes, and married to a much older man than her whose wife has left him, mirrors that of Rebecca and Maxim de Winter and I have to be honest and say that this is the part of the book in which I was fairly uninterested. This may be as I always found the Second Wife in Rebecca to be such a wimp I wanted to slap her and felt much the same this time around. I do feel that the Daphne/Symington heart of the story was strong enough to carry the narrative on its own, though of course there is a certain piquancy to see the eponymous PhD student studying the letters between Daphne and J A Symington that we had just read about. What is one generation's correspondence is material for future historians.
With that one small caveat I can say that I found this book fascinating and intriguing and has, once more, sent me back to my book cases to look at all my Bronte biographies, pull out my old Bronte Society papers, and plan a visit to Haworth again and perhaps take the walk to Top Withens. This may have to wait until the autumn, best not to visit the Parsonage at the height of the tourist season, best to visit when the days are drawing in, the lamps are lit and the wind is 'wuthering' and just wallow in the atmosphere.
And apropos of nothing, when I first visited Haworth as a teenager I stayed at a bed and breakfast in the village and was told by the landlady that they had had 'one of them authors' staying the week before and I was having her room. As with all things serendipitous, it seemed the former lodger was Winifred Gerin, whose biography of Branwell threatened to be published before Daphne's. So there you go. Make of that what you will.
