It is 1957, 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 own creations - especially Rebecca, the heroine of her most famous novel. Seeking distraction from her misery, Daphne becomes passionately interested in Branwell, the reprobate brother of the Bronte 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. In present-day London, a lonely young woman, newly married after a fleeting courtship with a man considerably older than her, struggles with her Ph.D. thesis on du Maurier and the Brontes. 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 the large, imposing house in Hampstead feel like her own. Retreating instead into the comfort of her library, she becomes absorbed in a fifty-year-old literary mystery. The last untold Bronte story, Daphne is a tale of obsession and possession, of stolen manuscripts and forged signatures, of love lost and love found; a tantalizing literary mystery that takes its reader into the heart of Daphne du Maurier's world.