When I was living in this road as a child,
I spent a lot of time immersed in
the fantasy world of the books that I got from the library.
But my top favourite, especially in the film version,
was Wuthering Heights.
Heathcliff. Make the world stop right here.
Make everything stop and stand still and never move again.
Make the moors never change and... you and I never change.
And this...was my moors.
I would run around being the wild child Cathy,
calling for Heathcliff.
Oh, I was so in love with him. He was my ideal man.
Older and wiser,
I realised that Hollywood had misled me.
They'd left a lot out.
Wuthering Heights never was a sentimental love story.
And Heathcliff is far from the rather soppy romantic lead
Laurence Olivier portrays in the film.
Emily Bronte's masterpiece
is a dark study of the wild extremes
of human obsession.
And my childhood heartthrob is a vicious psychopath.
Emily's older sister Charlotte wrote another book
that transfixed me.
The shocking Gothic romance Jane Eyre.
One of the best-selling novels of all time.
While Anne Bronte's brilliant The Tenant Of Wildfell Hall
scandalised Victorian society and is now widely regarded
as an early feminist classic.
I rate each of the Bronte sisters amongst
the greatest novelists I have ever read.
But I am left with a question.
How did three spinsters
who spent most of their life in a remote parsonage...
on the edge of the moors
come to write books
that I find shocking...
erotic...
profoundly moving...
..and quite wonderful?
My journey starts in the Yorkshire village of Haworth...
as I search through the life and work of the Bronte sisters
for some kind of explanation for this family's unique genius.
Patrick Bronte was appointed perpetual curate at Howarth in 1820.
And he and his wife Maria and six young children
moved here to the parsonage.
He was a self-made man. He was born in a tiny shack in Ireland.
Yet he got to Cambridge, where he got a first class degree.
Just six months after arriving in Haworth, Maria died of cancer.
Leaving Patrick with six children under the age of eight.
His two eldest daughters succumbed to TB
less than four years later.
The four surviving children,
Charlotte, Emily, Anne, and their brother Branwell,
were raised by their father at the parsonage
with the help of his late wife's sister Aunt Branwell.
Patrick encouraged the remarkable creativity of his precocious offspring.
This is a little pencil drawing by Branwell.
When he was 11 years old. It's rather sweet.
Each of the young Brontes showed some promise as artists.
This is really good, I think.
It's...it's a painting by Emily...
..of her dog - she had several dogs, but this is Keeper, I think.
But storytelling seems to have been their great passion.
Each week, the Reverend Bronte would prepare his sermon in the study
while upstairs the wild imaginations of his four children
would run riot in the small bedroom,
where they gathered to create exotic fantasy worlds.
Inspired in part by a childhood gift of 12 toy soldiers.
We have a lovely account by Charlotte
of Father buying the soldiers and returning back to Haworth with them.
Which er...which I can show you. Oh, right.
'Papa bought Branwell some soldiers at Leeds.'
'I snatched at one and exclaimed,
"This is the Duke of Wellington. It shall be mine!"'
'Mine was the bonniest, and perfect in every part.'
'Emily's was a grave-looking fellow
and we called him Gravy.'
'Anne's was a queer little thing,
very much like herself.'
'Branwell chose Bonaparte.' Oh, that's wonderful.
They would act out little plays with the soldiers.
And they went from acting them out
to writing them down.
And this is by Charlotte Bronte. She'd have been 14 when she wrote this.
And it's designed to be small enough for the toy soldiers to read.
But it had the advantage of being like a secret code
amongst the children.
And their father, or their aunt, just wouldn't have been able to read it.
Why was it so secret? Were they naughty stories, or...?
Well, as they got older, they were probably not what you would expect the vicar's children to be writing.
Their reading was uncensored,
so they were reading Byron and all kinds of Gothic books.
And everything fed into these stories.
'An Extraordinary Dream, by Lord Charles Wellesley.'
'In this slumber, I thought I was walking on the banks of a river...
which murmured over small pebbles at the bottom,
gleaming like crystals through the silver stream.'
'And the green buds of the wild rose trees around were unopened.'
'And a mild warmth was shed from the sun...
then at its height in the blue sky.'
That's obviously from their walks, isn't it?
Branwell and Charlotte created dozens of these little books.
Writing about life in a glamorous, exotic realm called Angria.
It was peopled by aristocratic characters
in these grand halls with balls and...
All the things that the Brontes had lacked in their everyday life.
Their younger sisters, Emily and Anne,
felt excluded from the Angria adventures.
So they invented a country of their own.
Emily even added their imaginary land, Gondal, to a geography textbook,
with a location in the North Pacific.
I just love the idea of these children in this tiny room
creating these extraordinary worlds.
And I'm sure this early writing work
would have developed the skills of all the Brontes.
But, while Charlotte and Anne drew on their adult experiences
to produce their later masterpieces,
their sister never abandoned the stories she wrote as a child.
For Emily,
the fantasy world that she created in Gondal
was used later as the basis for the only novel that she ever published,
Wuthering Heights.
But, whereas the imaginary world was set in tropical climates,
she set this in a landscape that she knew very well.
The wild moors that lay at the back of the home that she had lived in since she was a toddler.
I'm retracing the route that Emily would've followed across her beloved moors
to the location said to have inspired Wuthering Heights.
The bleak, remote farmhouse,
where Heathcliff makes his home.
This is Emily's opening description of that brutal, windswept landscape.
'Pure, bracing ventilation they must have up there at all times.'
'Indeed, one may guess the power of the north wind blowing over the edge
by the excessive slant of the few stunted firs
at the end of the house
and by the range of gaunt thorns,
all stretching their limbs one way,
as if craving alms of the sun.'
Cathy's undying obsession with the cruel Heathcliff
is mirrored by her love of this untamed wilderness.
And I'm sure the author's own passion for the landscape
can be heard in Cathy's almost blasphemous hymn to the moors.
'If I were in heaven, I should be extremely miserable.'
'I dreamt I was there once.'
'Heaven did not seem to be my home.'
'And I broke my heart with weeping to come back to Earth.'
'And the angels were so angry that they flung me out in the middle of the heath
on the top of Wuthering Heights,
where I awoke, sobbing for joy.'
Emily Bronte's tortured love story continues
to inspire new films, musicals, operas,
songs and ballets.
David Nixon choreographed a recent interpretation of Wuthering Heights for Northern Ballet.
I sat in with David for a rehearsal of the section where Heathcliff
takes revenge on Cathy for marrying his wealthy rival, Edgar Linton.
He taunts Cathy by toying with Linton's sister Isabella
under her jealous gaze.
That was really good. It's her reaction you're watching as you're touching her.
'I know what you've always wanted.'
'But...Missy here's gonna get it instead.'
Terrific. Well done. Well done.
Wonderful, wonderful. Really wonderful.
What theme most attracted you in the book?
I think there were kind of... probably two themes.
At one point in their youth,
there was this absolute harmony between two young people.
And it had to do with the moors and how at one they all were in that space.
And then, the...the contrast to that,
that as we grow up and as we make choices, how that actually destroys it.
Yes. Absolutely. It's an obsessional love affair.
It's something that they have to have. Have to.
And that's a lot of what we spoke about in rehearsal.
We didn't actually say a lot of 'in love' things. It was obsession.
What I just find unbelievable
is that it's so true. Yeah.
She understands the nature, not just of woman, but of man.
And this is a woman that had no life experience. I know.
This woman's had nothing. And yet she brings this truth of life to this book.
I mean, lust, sex - everything. And she hasn't had any of it, really.
Emily was only 27 when she completed Wuthering Heights.
Yet her novel tells us so much
about the darkest moments of the human condition.
When Cathy is dying, the scene between her and Heathcliff
is...absolutely amazing.
Anybody that's watched somebody they love die
will understand that...
..that appalling desperation
of wanting to... keep the person with you.
'Her present countenance had a wild vindictiveness...in its white cheek.'
'And a bloodless lip and scintillating eye.'
'And she retained in her closed fingers
a portion of locks she had been grasping.'
'As to her companion,
so inadequate was his stock of gentleness
to the requirements of her condition
that on his letting go I saw four distinct impressions
left blue in the colourless skin.'
I think I find Wuthering Heights particularly moving because...
I have felt all the feelings that are in that book.
Particularly the sense of loss...
and desperation.
And, luckily for me, great love.
Emily expresses many of these powerful emotions
using imagery from this majestic landscape.
And the moors do seem to have given inspiration to all three of the Bronte sisters.
But in other ways, these young women were each very different.
Emily's talent seemed to come from her Yorkshire roots.
And a wild imagination. But she wrote only for herself.
Now, her older sister, Charlotte,
was quite different.
She was ambitious and adventurous.
And hungry for fame.
The three Bronte girls were raised in humble surroundings
by their curate father Patrick
and their late mother's sister, Aunt Branwell.
Emily, Charlotte and Anne would go on to write classic Victorian novels.
But before their books were published,
the sisters spent many years trying to find other ways to earn money.
In the 19th century, most middle class women with no independent means
had to either get married
or work as governesses and teachers.
Something that the Bronte sisters did and wrote about in their books.
When they were young, they came as students
to this...school here. Roe Head School.
Later, Charlotte came here as a teacher.
It wasn't altogether a happy situation.
She wanted to be a writer, but circumstances dictated that she had to be a teacher.
There's a wonderful bit that Charlotte writes in The Roe Head Journal.
'Am I to spend all the best part of my life in this wretched bondage,
forcibly suppressing my rage at the idleness, the apathy
and most asinine stupidity of these fat-headed oafs?'
That's wonderful. That must sum up a lot of teachers' attitudes.
What she's wanting to do is write about her imaginary world, Angria.
And she can't. She has to sit there and teach these wretched children.
While she was teaching at Roe Head,
Charlotte wrote to the poet laureate, Robert Southey, asking
for his opinion of a selection of her poems.
He wrote back to her, 'Literature cannot be the business of a woman's life.'
'And it ought not to be.'
'The more she is engaged in her proper duties
the less leisure she will have for it.'
'Even as an accomplishment or a recreation.'
Now, you and I, I'm sure, will be up in arms about that.
But the point about the whole letter is that he's actually saying to her,
'It's OK to write poetry, but don't try to be famous with your writing.'
'Write poetry for its own sake, not with a view to celebrity.'
But if you are a woman, living in a vicarage...
..you are going to have to aim for... success.
And we wouldn't have heard of any of those girls
if Charlotte hadn't wanted... 'celebrity.'
But even for a woman as ambitious and driven as Charlotte Bronte,
Southey's letter was a major setback.
Charlotte kept the envelope and she wrote upon it...
'Southey's Advice. To be kept for ever.'
'Roe Head, April 21st 1837.'
My 21st birthday. Oh, really? And then at the top,
she's written, 'Melpomene.'
And that's the muse of tragedy. Oh, really?
When she went back to school, all she would concentrate on was doing her duty as a teacher.
And you think that was partly as a result of his letter. I'm sure it is.
Because it closed that door for her.
The route to a literary career seemed to be shut off for the Brontes.
Their early efforts in education had proved a dead end.
So it was time to start out on a new path.
The three sisters, now all in their 20s,
hatched a plan.
They would establish a school of their own.
Their ever-loving Aunt Branwell
gave them the money to set up the school.
And Charlotte and Emily used part of it to go to Brussels
to improve their French, and other subjects,
so that they had better credentials.
Charlotte's time in Belgium was to have a profound effect on her.
I joined a tour of the Belgian capital,
run by the Brussels Bronte Society,
to find out more about the sisters' stay in the city.
Brussels was a cosmopolitan city.
It was also cheaper than Paris.
So a lot of English people sent their daughters to be educated here.
The Bronte sisters attended services at the protestant chapel here.
And Charlotte in particular enjoyed watching the ladies
coming out and the way they were dressed -
far better dressed than uh...
the English ladies.
Charlotte's interest in Belgian fashion is certainly
at odds with her reputation as a simple country girl.
But more importantly, the tuition she received in Brussels,
at the Pensionnat Heger, would transform her as a writer.
The pensionnat, where the sisters stayed and studied,
was straight in the middle of this uh...street.
Charlotte described Mr Heger, their teacher,
as a brilliant man.
And she felt that she was respected for her passion for writing and willingness to learn.
Is it true also that he made her economise in language?
He...he taught them discipline.
The improvement in Charlotte's writing was enormous.
Mr Heger certainly helped his pupil to develop her writing style.
He may also have aroused unfamiliar passions
in this 27-year-old Yorkshirewoman,
driving the dutiful daughter of an Anglican minister
to an extraordinary visit to the Catholic cathedral in Brussels.
A remarkable episode in Charlotte's life happened here.
She felt so bad, she decided to enter the cathedral and confess.
There was a letter to Emily where she said, 'For heaven's sake, don't tell Father.'
Because he was so...absolutely against Catholicism.
Yes, of course. But it gives a fascinating idea
of how desperate she must've been feeling, that she felt the need for that.
In the end, she felt she had to find comfort somewhere, even with a Catholic priest.
We will never know exactly what Charlotte said in the secret of the confessional.
But there are strong clues that she may have been experiencing
the sort of terrible emotional turmoil
she would later write about in her classic novels.
Evidence of Charlotte's state of mind
can be found back in London, at The British Library,
in a series of letters she wrote to Mr Heger
after leaving Brussels.
They probably are the most important relics of Charlotte Bronte.
They tell us about her feelings for a man who was her mentor
at a crucial point in her life.
She says some very daring things to Monsieur.
She said, 'You showed me a little interest in Brussels.'
'I demand that you show me the same interest now.'
Unsurprisingly, this father of five,
under the watchful eye of his wife Madame Heger,
does not seem to have been very pleased to receive these passionate letters
from his former pupil.
He tore them up, put them in his wastepaper basket,
and what I imagine is that Madame plucked them out.
She has...threaded a needle...
..and patiently sewn the pieces of the letter together.
Because she had to understand the dynamic
between her husband and his star pupils.
And she understood from reading these letters
that she should have nothing more to do with the Brontes.
And she refused to have English pupils for some years.
Can you give me an example of why you think...
that she was really in love with this man?
Well...what we have here
is...the last letter she wrote to Monsieur.
And this is the one letter we have that wasn't torn up.
She says...'I must say one word to you in English.'
And...she goes on to tell him that she delighted
in speaking in French,
because it reminded her of him.
And she says...
'Every word was most precious to me...
because it reminded me of you.' Oh!
'I love French...for your sake...
with all my heart and soul.' Oh, dear.
So I think that Monsieur never replied to this letter.
And, by enlarging this letter for the camera,
we have discovered that that full stop...
is actually in the shape of a heart. So it is!
It is a heart. This is amazing!
So she sent this message to Monsieur.
But I don't think we can think of love in our present day sense.
It isn't...adulterous, it isn't an affair.
But it's more than friendship. Because...
for a very...proper young woman in the middle of the 19th century...
..she had to imagine love rather than enact it.
And that imagining was crucial for her writing.
One of the great myths about the Brontes
is that they never experienced the emotions that they expressed
so powerfully in their books.
I certainly don't think that is true of Charlotte,
and her great classic Jane Eyre,
in which the young heroine has a doomed passion for the married Mr Rochester.
This is Jane, when Mr Rochester is proposing to her.
She thinks he's just talking about her having to leave.
But I feel it's something to do with what Charlotte Bronte felt
when she had to leave the man she loved in Brussels.
'I grieve to leave Thornfield.'
'Because I have lived in it a full and delightful life,
momentarily, at least.'
'I have talked face to face with an original,
a vigorous and expanded mind.'
'I have known you, Mr Rochester,
and it strikes me with terror and anguish
to feel I absolutely must be torn from you for ever.'
'I see the necessity of departure.'
'And it is like looking on the necessity of death.'
I'm sure she was thinking of her lover. Or her not-lover.
I think that Jane Eyre is a wonderful novel.
It can drive me to tears and laughter at the same reading.
And, for me, that spirit has really been captured
by artist Dame Paula Rego.
Oh, yes. That's a strange one.
She has produced a series of works
based on texts from the book.
Many of the pieces cover the cruel treatment of Jane as a young orphan,
often in the house of her aunt, Mrs Reed.
This is marvellous. This is marvellous.
They punish her by throwing her all alone in this big room.
She's flat on her tummy.
Oh! She's all crumpled.
Mm. I called this Crumpled.
It's wonderful. This is one of my favourites, this.
Because it's just...how it was.
How it was for her. Yes.
Has it ever been like that for you?
I've felt crumpled, yes. Scared stiff.
And these pictures reflect the characters as they are written.
Not the more sentimental versions often portrayed in adaptations.
Jane was ugly. She says so herself.
But nine times out of ten, if you see a movie,
the girl is prettily plain.
You know. Sort of, no makeup.
That's the concession to ugliness.
But you actually make no bones about it.
Yeah. That is not a beautiful woman.
That is Jane.
In Charlotte's novel, Jane does eventually find love.
In the form of the aloof, unattainable Mr Rochester.
You're showing him with this dark, sort of glowering look.
Yeah. What do you think of Rochester?
Well, I think he's a pompous twit.
And I think he's not kind.
And he's very...very nasty to women.
He cares about Jane, though, do you not think, in the end?
I think he's pleased that he's alive.
Yes. Cos he could've been dead.
Charlotte does allow her unfortunate heroine a happy ending.
After all the passionate love and shocking Gothic carryings-on,
this is what happens.
'Reader...I married him.'
'A quiet wedding we had...he and I'
'When we got back from church,
I went into the kitchen and I said,
"Mary, I have been married to Mr Rochester this morning."'
'Mary, bending again over the roast,
said only, "Have you, Miss?"'
'"Well, for sure."'
It's so funny, to end up with something so...
casual and...nonchalant.
Brilliant.
Charlotte based her clever, passionate and witty books
on her own rich and varied emotional life.
Her sister Emily drew on her childhood fantasies
for her only published novel.
But Anne Bronte was different again.
Her greatest work was a campaigning novel...
now seen as a ground-breaking feminist classic.
By 1845,
Charlotte, Emily and Anne Bronte
were all living with their father Patrick back in the parsonage.
The two older girls had returned from Brussels.
But there were no takers for their planned school in Haworth.
Probably because of its remote location.
The Bronte sisters, now in their late 20s,
and yet to start writing their novels,
still needed to find a way to earn a living.
Then Charlotte came upon something that would change their lives for ever.
On a little writing desk like this, she found a notebook
full of Emily's poems.
Like this one. Maybe even this one.
She wrote, 'I know no woman that ever lived
ever wrote such poetry before.'
Emily was furious that Charlotte had invaded her privacy.
She didn't even want her poetry read. Wow!
But she was persuaded that they should publish a collection of their works.
This is the very first edition
of Poems by Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell.
They decided to adopt pseudonyms,
because they recognised that there was a kind of double standard
in the way writing was reviewed.
And they wanted to be viewed as writers, not particularly women writers.
There's one here that I like by Ellis, nee Emily.
And it's called To Imagination.
'So hopeless is the world without,
The world within I doubly prize.'
'The world where guile and hate and doubt
and cold suspicion never rise.'
'Where thou and I and liberty
have undisputed sovereignty.'
It must rank as one of the biggest failures in the history of publishing.
There were two copies...sold.
Oh, no! Despite some very favourable reviews.
And Charlotte sent some of the remaining copies
to authors, accompanied by this note.
'Sir, my relatives Ellis and Acton Bell and myself
have committed the rash act of printing a volume of poems.'
'The consequences predicted have, of course, overtaken us.'
'Our book is found to be a drug. No man needs it or heeds it.'
'In the space of a year, our publisher has disposed but of two copies.'
'And by what painful efforts
he succeeded in getting rid of these,
to himself only knows.'
Oh, that's tragic. But funny, as well.
Yeah. Bless her. I mean, she's...
making a joke of it. That's right. It must have been a crushing disappointment.
But she was determined erm... to carry on with the publishing.
It had given a zest to life.
Having lost money on their volume of poetry,
the Bronte sisters resolved to focus their formidable energies
on a more lucrative side of the literary business.
They set to work writing novels.
Every evening, at about nine o'clock,
Patrick would leave his study...
..wind up that clock,
and then make his way to bed.
With him gone, the three girls...
would come into the dining room and promenade around this table,
reading extracts of their work to one another.
This production line produced three classic novels.
Emily's Wuthering Heights, Anne's Agnes Grey and Charlotte's The Professor.
And the first two were accepted for publication.
Charlotte's was rejected. However,
she just sat down and, in a few weeks, she produced...
Jane Eyre.
Jane Eyre was published first.
And was an instant hit.
Wuthering Heights and Agnes Grey followed two months later.
They were less successful. But all three of the sisters
were now published novelists.
Their brother Branwell, however,
was in a desperate state.
As a young man, Branwell had been the golden boy of the Bronte family.
He was the guiding force behind their childhood writings,
had poems published in local papers,
and harboured serious ambitions
to become a professional artist.
Here, in the National Portrait Gallery,
is Branwell's only surviving painting of his three sisters.
Originally, he was in the picture. There.
You can see a faint outline.
But, for some reason,
he painted himself out with a pillar.
Which is fortunately beginning to fade, so we know what happened.
It's a slight mystery as to why he did that.
I mean, I think the official reason is that it was...
he thought the composition was better without him.
Or maybe he just painted himself... really rather badly.
But...I think
it's an amazing image...
of what was gonna happen later.
Either through lack of ability or lack of application,
Branwell never made it as a portrait painter.
And he was later dismissed from a succession of jobs.
By the time his sisters started to win fame as writers,
he had been sacked as a tutor.
Seemingly because of an affair with his employer's wife.
He returned, grief-stricken, to the parsonage,
where he sank into serious alcohol and drug abuse.
This is a room that...
eventually, Branwell shared with his father.
What happened was that he came back...paralytic one night.
And he managed to set fire to his bedclothes.
Anne and Emily rescued him,
and Patrick decided he had to keep an eye on him.
Can you imagine what it was like in this house?
His whole life was disintegrating,
this beloved brother and son, in front of their eyes.
But out of it came a wonderful book by Anne.
The Tenant Of Wildfell Hall.
It is one of the best studies of alcoholism,
and its effect on the family and everybody around them,
that I have ever read.
Branwell used to blame his alcoholism
on a sad affair that he had with a married woman.
And it is sometimes a trait of addiction
that people are apt to blame other people for their terrible illness.
The character in Wildfell Hall turns on his wife
and blames her for all his bad behaviour.
And this is a typical passage of that.
'As for him, for the first week or two he was peevish and low.'
'Fretting, I suppose, over his dear Annabella's departure.'
That's his mistress.
'And particularly ill-tempered to me.'
'Everything I did was wrong.'
'I was cold-hearted, hard, insensate.'
'My sour, pale face was perfectly repulsive.'
'My voice made him shudder.'
'He knew not how he could live through the winter with me.'
'I should kill him by inches.'
Anne's The Tenant Of Wildfell Hall
was a revolutionary depiction
of the powerlessness of a woman in an abusive marriage.
And I think it's every bit as good as the better-known Bronte books.
In fact,
all three sisters produced enduring masterpieces.
How did it happen? How was it possible?
Three Victorian spinsters...
living in isolation on the Yorkshire moors...
Award-winning playwright Polly Teale
has written extensively about the Brontes.
I joined Polly to talk about this unique literary family
at the dining room table where so many of the Bronte classics were produced.
When they're writing and walking round this table,
they must've had such a laugh.
And they must've... inspired one another.
It must've been a kind of furnace, mustn't it? With the three of them.
Right from when they were children. Because they did that with Angria and...
the books, the little, tiny books. Yes.
And their father gave them this extraordinary access to literature.
And they read in a way that would've been very unusual for...for girls at that time.
And in fact, you could only go to the local library if you were a man.
So they had to get Branwell to bring the books back for them.
Our books are covered in flour and spatters of gravy.
The library have complained.
Well, not to us. We are not allowed to go there.
Fathers and sons only.
But our brother tells us that a carrot peeling was found,
lying like a bookmark, by the librarian.
I think none of them would have written
but for the existence of the others.
Even Branwell. I think they could almost smell it off him.
These...affairs, these adventures that he was having.
Living this life out there in the world,
whilst they were...
really confined to this...
very domestic world that women occupied.
Do you think they would've written the books
if they'd had the kind of freedom that we have?
Perhaps a lot of the power of the books comes out of that repression.
You know. It's almost like in their writing
there was an opportunity for them to take revenge on a world that...
didn't allow them a voice.
And yet, here, alone in this room...
they could say whatever they wanted to.
It seems that the safe haven of the parsonage
and the bonds that formed between the four Bronte children within its walls
were crucial to their art.
But this was also a very unhealthy place to live.
The average life expectancy in Haworth
was just 25.
Partly as a result of the church graveyard polluting the drinking water
as it flowed down from the moors.
The two oldest Bronte girls, Maria and Elizabeth,
had died of TB, or consumption, as it used to be known, as young children.
In 1848, this terrible disease would strike again at the family.
Branwell was the first to succumb,
dying in September that year at the age of 31.
His sister Emily, aged just 30...
..followed only three months later.
Anne too developed the symptoms of consumption.
And, as her condition deteriorated, she wrote this heart-breaking letter.
'I wish it would please God to spare me.'
'Not only for Papa and Charlotte's sakes...
..but because I long to do some good in the world...
before I leave it.'
'I have many schemes in my head for future practice.'
'Humble and limited indeed, but still,
I should not like them to come to nothing...
..and myself to have lived to so little purpose.'
'But God's will be done.'
Anne came here to Scarborough with Charlotte.
She thought somehow it would make her feel better.
She had been here before,
when she was governess to a family, and she fell in love with it.
Sadly, her condition worsened. They couldn't get her back to Haworth.
And she died here in 1849... aged only 29.
Anne's death was a gentle and brave one.
And almost her last words were,
'Take courage, Charlotte, take courage.'
So...Charlotte was on her own.
She wrote...
'It is over.'
'Emily...Branwell...Anne...
..all are gone...like dreams.'
'I have watched them fall asleep on my arm...
..have closed their glazed eyes.'
'I have seen them buried, one by one.'
Desperately lonely, Charlotte threw herself into her work.
And, less than six months after Anne's death, published a new novel - Shirley.
I met biographer Lucasta Miller
at the Red House in Gomersal,
model for the home of the Yorke family in Shirley,
to find out how the now celebrated author
would cope with her terrible loss.
Charlotte came back from Scarborough and there she was, alone with Patrick.
It must've been a nightmare to come back to Haworth.
There's an absolutely heartrending story of Charlotte going down to the dining room
where previously she and her sisters used to...
walk round, talking about their writing.
And...going round and round the table on her own.
Really, it's an absolutely appalling sense of loss and bereavement.
And Charlotte was facing further problems.
The Bronte sisters had written a series of controversial novels.
Jane Eyre was about the relationship between a married man and his governess...
both of Anne's books were campaigning attacks
on conventional Victorian society...
..whilst Wuthering Heights was considered amoral and ungodly.
When it became known that the authors of these novels were actually women...
Victorian society was scandalised.
A storm was brewing against the work and the morals of the Brontes.
Charlotte's response would be to create a new work of fiction.
She republished Wuthering Heights.
Which gave her the opportunity to write a short biographical notice of her sisters.
She is trying to get the public... almost to forgive them
for having written these shocking books.
It's a piece of Victorian spin.
She creates this myth of the moors and Haworth, as if that was
all there was to their inspiration.
She presents her sisters as being uneducated.
She says neither Emily nor Anne were learned,
when in fact they were voracious readers.
You know. They were highly - And they spoke French.
..intelligent. They wrote all their lives.
I had already discovered that the Bronte sisters were not the isolated,
uneducated country girls of popular imagination.
They enjoyed an excellent, if unconventional education
and quite a wealth of experiences for young women of the age.
What I hadn't realised was
that this story was partly concocted by Charlotte
to protect the reputations of the sisters
whose loss she mourned so deeply.
But it seems Charlotte may have dealt a much more substantial blow
to the Bronte legacy.
She went through all her sisters' papers after they died.
She prepared some of their poetry to be published.
And in some cases making really quite...substantial changes.
She actually changed words? She changed words.
And, more...tragically, it's also possible that Charlotte
destroyed the unfinished manuscript
of a possible second novel by Emily.
I hope that's not true. That is awful. We can't be sure.
How would she have destroyed it? Will we find it?
Is it likely to be in somebody's attic in pieces?
If she did destroy it, she probably burnt it.
You can be...particularly if you're insane with grief,
you can make strange decisions... can't you?
Thinking...they wouldn't like that.
Try and do what you think is best. I suppose that's what she was doing.
It's just tragic for us if there was a second book.
We will never know if Emily wrote a second novel.
But Charlotte herself produced one more book.
Villette - based heavily on her experiences in Brussels.
She also found some brief respite
from the crippling loneliness she had felt
since the death of her brother and her sisters.
In 1852,
Arthur Bell Nicholls,
the curate to Patrick in Haworth,
proposed to Charlotte.
To begin with, she wasn't particularly interested.
And Patrick opposed it.
But Nicholls won them round.
And in 1854, they married... in the father's church.
The villagers said that she looked like a snowdrop.
He was a nice man. He wasn't at all like...
the rather sadistic heroes of the girls' novels.
But sadly, after a few months, Charlotte died...
..in the early stages of pregnancy.
Charlotte, only 38 years old,
was laid to rest alongside her mother,
her brother and three of her sisters.
Beneath the church where her father served as rector for more than 40 years.
I hope with all my heart
that the beautiful last paragraph of Emily's Wuthering Heights,
which is actually about the graves of Cathy and Heathcliff and Linton,
could also be applied to the graves of the Brontes.
'I lingered round them...
under that benign sky.'
'Watched the moths fluttering among the heath and harebells...
..and listened to the soft wind
breathing through the grass...
..and wondered how anyone could ever imagine unquiet slumbers...
for the sleepers... in that quiet earth.'
Subtitles by deluxe