The Content Reader

Daphne du Maurier is mostly known for her novels (Rebecca, Frenchman's Creek and a lot of others), but she has actually written some non-fiction books as well. She was asked to write a new introduction to the new edition of Wuthering Heights  in 1954 and so she went to Haworth. During her visit there she got intrigued by Branwell and could not understand why he had been ignored by Brontë researchers. From Margaret Forster's excellent biography of Dahpne du Maurier we find the following note: (it) gave her the opportunity to test herself in a way she had, in fact, always wnated to do. There was a good deal of the scholar manqué in Daphne, in spite of her frequent claims to have a butterfly mind. As it was, she was prepared to teach herself by trial and error... Du Maurier has a lot of sympathy for Branwell, which of course is a must if you are writing a biography. Having read some Brontë biographies (for example the excellently The Brontës  by Juliet Barker) there was n...