For novelist Tracy Chevalier, there’s a special magic about being in the same room as objects the Brontës have created.
They allow an “extraordinary insight into how Charlotte, Emily and Anne became the Brontës”, says Dr Mullin."Other items, above all Emily’s notebook of 31 poems, with her own and Charlotte’s marginal notes, show the tensions and compromises required to make private writing public. Some of those tensions were to do with the increasingly painful gulf between the sisters’ successes and their brother’s conspicuous failure, as Branwell’s letter indicating his descent into addiction shows.
Both Dr Mullin and Chevalier will discuss their insights into the collection in a talk next month, exploring with the audience what it reveals about the Brontës’ life and work and how the sisters developed as writers. “They were so isolated, they fell back on themselves as a little unit,” Chevalier muses. “They would make up and tell each other little stories, about the toy soldiers they had, other characters they came up with.
"I think it will always be a little bit of a mystery why three great writers came from one household,” she continues. “These [items] are more of the jigsaw puzzle but it’s still remarkable that three sisters used to sit and write and read together, read their stories out to each other in the evening...I don’t think there are many families where that would happen.”
With the death of their mother and the remoteness of their home, the sisters relied on each other and were forced on their own company and imaginations to entertain themselves, Chevalier says. “But then there’s just that extra spark of magic. And no number of uncovered manuscripts and letters is going to explain that.”