DAPHNE

The life of Daphne du Maurier (1907-89), popular author of romantic suspense fiction, including the classic Rebecca, is the inspiration for veteran author Picardie’s speculative biographical novel.

The action spans the years 1957-60 and evolves from the conflicting ambitions of three major characters. Primus inter pares is du Maurier herself, now 50, internationally famous and more than financially secure (thanks in part to Alfred Hitchcock’s tingling film version of Rebecca). She is nevertheless troubled by the infidelity of her oafish husband Tommy, and by stalled work on her definitive biography of the “other” Brontë: the celebrated sisters’ unstable brother Branwell, believed by many (including Daphne) to be the real genius of the insular Yorkshire clan. But the Brontës have of course spawned a competitive army of scholars, and Daphne’s fears that her original work will be ignored or overshadowed are exacerbated by the machinations of John Alexander Symington, curator of the Brontë Parsonage Museum in Haworth (and also a real person, to whom a scandalous reputation still adheres). The third protagonist is an initially unnamed doctorate student who is researching the carefully sheltered life of—you guessed it, reader—eminent author Daphne du Maurier. Picardie has assembled promising ingredients for a literature-inflected satirical mystery, perhaps along the lines of Angus Wilson’s Anglo-Saxon Attitudes, or even Vladimir Nabokov’s ineffably mischievous Pale Fire. But Daphne is dull, its inherently dramatic romantic-Gothic materials flattened into tiresome scholarspeak and redundant exchanges of discoveries and theories among rival researchers. One admires Picardie’s own evidently scrupulous research, but it remains fodder for discussion, inert and unwelcoming on every page. Nor has Picardie escaped the trap of attempting to persuade readers of the “genius” of a might-have-been about whom far too little is known.

A century and a half after Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights, and those sly Brontës still decline to divulge their secrets.