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As my daughter and I walked side by side, tilting our umbrellas into the rain and wind, crossing the bleak but beautiful moors that still surround Haworth, I noticed that the signs to the familiar footpaths where the Bronte children had trodden, were also in Japanese. Indeed, walking beside us under a lowering grey sky, were Japanese tourists as well as others who had come, pilgrims like us in this literary haj from many parts of the world.
The question I asked myself was what did this obsession with the Brontes stem from: Why had these people come so far? Was it to find out more about the tragic lives of these three sisters, to marvel at Charlotte's wedding hat or her tiny pair of gloves, or was it to stare at original texts in an effort to understand their work? Or was it even possible to distinguish one from the other? Why is Jane Eyre still read with such passion all over the world, as is Charlotte's sister's book Wuthering Heights. Even Agnes Grey has a steady following.
Certainly there are elements in the lives of these women to fascinate most of us, elements that seem to come from fairy tale: the triumvirate, so much like the three princesses, the abandon by the parents, the mother dying, the father shut away in his grief, the arrival of the stranger, the aunt from Penzance in their midst with her old fashioned dress and false curls, her complaints of cold and damp, her warnings of hellfire and damnation. Later we have the three talented sisters left to spin webs of their own, conjuring up magic worlds together, inventing Gondal and Angria, writing in their tiny letters, "making up" as they walked around the table in the dark after dinner. We have the "bad" brother lowering in the background, creating chaos in the parsonage with his unfortunate passion and drugged ravings. The misery and humiliation the girls suffer starved in their charity school and then as down-trodden governesses and teachers only to triumph albeit so briefly in their own lives as famous authors.
The books the three sisters managed to write, too, have some of these fairy tale elements which continue to fascinate: the reversal that is at the heart of any good fairy tale, Cinderella who becomes the princess, or here Jane Eyre who returns to her damaged master and marries him, Agnes Grey who finally meets the love of her life by the sea, even Cathy united with her Heathcliff albeit in death.
In all these books we have strong and sometimes even reckless female characters who are willing to throw caution to the winds to affront the elements in pursuit of their desires, who show great strength of character and overcome adversity or at least maintain their integrity and dignity in the face of all the odds.
Trying to understand the continuing fascination of the Brontes life and work I was struck by the links between the drama of these lives and that of the works the lives produced, a subject I pursued in Becoming Jane Eyre. I was fascinated by the mysterious and subtle ties between all our lives and our imaginary worlds. Certainly, the world of the imagination in the form of books and stories which the Bronte children read at such a young age affected their own lives and work. Literature too, the taste of the times, and in our day of course the movies and internet comes into play here, so that our reality is often altered and fashioned by the fantasy lives we share through art.
Sheila Kohler, 
Becoming Jane Eyre, 
The Brontes, 
Charlotte Bronte, 
historical fiction, 
Penguin Books
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