Show 18: the former Vogue journalist and writer on her latest novel, Daphne...
Justine Picardie is a journalist who worked most recently at Vogue and as editor of the Observer Magazine. She is now a full-time freelance writer and lives with her husband and two sons in London.
Picardie is the author of the critically acclaimed non-fiction memoir, If the Spirit Moves You: Life and Love After Death, which chronicled a year in Justine’s life following the death of her sister from breast cancer.
She has written the novel Wish I May and, most recently, My Mother’s Wedding Dress. She is also the co-writer or editor of several other books. She was formerly the features editor of Vogue and is now a columnist for the Sunday Telegraph Magazine and writes for Harpers Bazaar.
Justine has always been a big Daphne Du Maurier fan and has been keen to show what a clever, complex and unconventional writer she was, repudiating the ‘romantic novelist’ tag which critics have labelled her in the past. Her latest novel, Daphne, is based around Du Maurier’s life, and already looks likely to be made into a film in the near future.
Daphne
Daphne is based on a trove of letters that have been lying hidden in archives of the Bronte Parsonage in Haworth. Possessed by her discovery of stolen manuscripts and forged signatures, Justine Picardie has written a novel that blurs the distinction between fiction and reality. This is a story that unravels the intriguing tale of Daphne du Maurier’s obsession with the renegade Bronte brother, Branwell, and the shadow of his dark legacy.
It is 1957. The author Daphne du Maurier, beautiful, famous, despairing as her marriage falls apart, finds herself haunted by Rebecca, the heroine of her most famous novel, written twenty years earlier. Her only confidante is her cousin, Peter Llewelyn-Davies, the inspiration to J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan. Resolving to write herself out of her misery, Daphne becomes passionately interested in Branwell, the reprobate brother of the Brontë sisters, and begins a correspondence with the enigmatic bibliophile Alex Symington as she researches a biography. But behind Symington’s respectable scholarly surface is a slippery character with much to hide, and soon truth and fiction have become indistinguishable.
In present-day London, a lonely young woman, newly married after a fleeting courtship with a man considerably older than her, struggles with her PhD thesis on Daphne du Maurier. Her husband, still seemingly in thrall to his brilliant, charismatic first wife, is frequently distant and mysterious, and she can’t find a way to make this large, imposing house in Hampstead feel like her own. Retreating instead into the comfort of her library, she begins to become absorbed in a fifty-year-old literary mystery…