British critics called Daphne, published in 2008, the most striking neo-Gothic novel since The Thirteenth Tale. And if Diana Setterfield only associatively referred the reader to the classics of English literature of the 19th and 20th centuries, to the works of the Bronte sisters and Daphne Du Maurier, then Justine Picardie makes them her main characters, with all their obsessions and passions. Here Daphne Du Maurier, buying manuscripts of dubious origin from a manic collector, writes a biography of Branwell Brontë, the despicable and disgraced brother of the famous Charlotte and Emily, and a young Cambridge graduate, our contemporary, collecting material for her dissertation on Daphne, begins to feel like the heroine of the famous “Rebecca.” Like “Rebecca”, “Jane Eyre” or “Wuthering Heights”, “Daphne” is a novel about that dense and unknown that lives in every person and cannot be understood or controlled. And there are simply too many family secrets, gloomy mansions and ominous ghosts of the past here.