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.

DAPHNE by Justine Picardie
Bloomsbury £14.99 pp408

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