British mysteries, Greek drama

Daphne
By Justine Picardie
Bloomsbury, 405 pp., $25.99

The September Society
By Charles Finch
St. Martin's Minotaur, 320 pp., $24.95

Where Three Roads Meet: The Myth of Oedipus
By Salley Vickers
Canongate, 176 pp., $20

If Jane Eyre is one of literature's most enduring heroines, then the unnamed narrator of Daphne du Maurier's "Rebecca" is surely Eyre's modern successor, another innocent who enters the great house of the brooding master-husband. Yet the two novels are worlds apart; just look at their opening lines. "Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again," du Maurier's fey narrator announces, whereas careful Jane begins by saying that "there was no possibility of taking a walk that day." Which woman would you trust, as witness or storyteller?

Du Maurier was reportedly drawn to the Brontës, and that connection is at the heart of Justine Picardie's engaging new novel, "Daphne," which opens with echoes of du Maurier herself: "To begin. Where to begin? To begin at the beginning, wherever that might be."

Picardie, a clever writer and diligent researcher, here tells two alternating stories. One narrative presents du Maurier in the 1950s, already famous, with a faltering marriage and a growing fascination with the Brontës, in particular Branwell, whose biography she is writing. The other story, set in present-day London, is narrated by an anonymous young innocent who has married a moody, divorced Henry James scholar. The new bride is uneasy in her master's gloomy house. Unlike Jane Eyre, however, this orphan is beautiful and a literature student, not a governess. She is also obsessed with du Maurier's novels and with the 1950s correspondence between du Maurier and Alex Symington, a self-styled Brontë expert.

In chapters that shuttle smoothly between past and present, Picardie takes us inside the minds of our unhappy modern heroine, of despairing du Maurier, and of the dishonest Symington. Through poems and letters, we even catch glimpses of Branwell. All of which - along with forgery, incest, mental breakdown, suicide, and affairs lesbian and heterosexual - could have been far too much. But Picardie, as she capably manages the intertwined plots, keeps our attention fixed on the two very different women. Attention is one thing, but affection another. Neither heroine ultimately engages our sympathies as did dreary little Jane or even tiresome Mrs. de Winter.

We don't really need the du Maurier family tree, which Picardie includes, to follow her story, but it presumably adds what the hero of Charles Finch's novels would call "tone." Finch's detective, Charles Lenox, loves tone, the British aristocracy, "old families," and "family seats." He will even settle for "an old family with a relatively new dukedom." Lenox practices his sleuthing (as an amateur, of course) in Victorian England, a blessed place.Finch's latest novel, "The September Society," provides Lenox with a murdered Oxford student, lots of "clues," and an opportunity for somebody to embarrass Lenox by referring to "that small job you did for Buckingham Palace." Attended by his faithful manservant, the gentleman detective sleuths away in Oxford and London even as his heart yearns for his true love, Lady Jane Grey, a drip with whom P. G. Wodehouse would have had merciless fun. Readers of Myles na Gopaleen's humorous writing, by the way, will also be delighted to encounter a Lenox sidekick pouncing on a villain "in one swift, athletic movement."

A really old family is the subject of Salley Vickers's glowing sliver of a novel, "Where Three Roads Meet: The Myth of Oedipus." Yes, that family. Vickers's idea is an obvious one yet, as she presents it here, utterly surprising: Imagine an extended conversation between the psychiatrist who identified the "Oedipus complex" and a central character from the original drama. In 1938, a dying Sigmund Freud, tortured by oral cancer and increasingly drastic surgery, is visited in his adopted London home by Tiresias, the blind prophet who revealed to King Oedipus his true nature and fate. "It has been my life's work, listening to stories," Freud tells Tiresias, who begins to recount the tragedy of Oedipus, in a series of brief visits that occur during the final year of Freud's life.

"Drifting in and out of islands of pain" and increasingly lulled by morphine, the analyst is now the one lying on the couch, listening for the last time, not to a patient but to a Delphic priest. "I put it to you, Doctor," Tiresias argues on an early visit, "that our gods are what 'good' and 'bad' once were before they became categories in human reasoning." To which Freud replies: "My dear good fellow, what you call a 'god' is a projection occasioned by the desire to revert to a state of infantile dependency." Vickers's triumph here is one of feeling. "Where Three Roads Meet" is not a slick novel but a profoundly moving one that compresses the horror and nobility of Oedipus' tragedy and the suffering of one extraordinary mortal.

Anna Mundow, a correspondent for the Irish Times, can be reached at ama1668@hotmail.com.