The author Daphne du Maurier, beautiful and famous, despairs as her marriage falls apart. Restlessly roaming through Menabilly, her remote mansion by the sea in Cornwall, she is haunted by regret and by her creations—especially Rebecca, from her most famous novel. Seeking distraction from her misery, Daphne becomes passionately interested in Branwell, the reprobate brother of the BrontÞe sisters, and begins a correspondence with the enigmatic scholar Alex Symington as she researches a biography. But behind Symington's respectable surface is a slippery character with much to hide, and soon truth and fiction have become indistinguishable.