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.
Resolving to write herself out of her misery, Daphne becomes passionately interested in Branwell Bronte, the reprobate brother of the Bronte sisters, and begins a correspondence with Alex Symington, an enigmatic Bronte scholar and bibliophile, as she researches a biography. But behind Symington’s respectable scholarly surface is a slippery character with much to hide, and Daphne becomes embroiled in a literary mystery where truth and fiction become indistinguishable.
Half a century later, a young woman tries to untangle the story of du Maurier, Symington and the Brontes, and in doing so, begins to make sense of her own shadowy history. Daphne is a story of obsession and possession; of stolen manuscripts and forged signatures; of love lost, and love found; of the way into imaginary worlds, and the way out of them.