It portrays an ethereal, magical and decidedly feminine world, and some of the digitally-manipulated photographs have an almost pre-Raphaelite quality.

Swiss artist Annelies Strba uses her daughters and granddaughters as models. She says she uses heart more than head to arrive at pictures which evoke a kind of fairytale world – each one a moment of drama in itself, but one which also prompts the observer to embellish from their own imagination.

Her new show, My Life Dreams, opening today at the Brontë Parsonage Museum in Haworth, comes from her fascination with the famous family, their moorland home and their work. Many of the images are strongly inspired by Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights and the illustrations for the 1935 edition of the novel by the artist Balthus.

The unconventional love story and the extraordinary intensity of the feelings described lit a creative fuse in Strba. She says: "Artists from all over the world have been led by the universal themes of love, passion, tragedy, hardship, creativity, suffering and courage."

Strba explains her first encounter with the Brontës came a couple of decades ago: "I had never heard of the sisters before – they were not well-known in Switzerland. But I saw a black and white photograph of the Parsonage and graveyard in a book, and it haunted me and moved me to know about their lives and their writing. I was inspired by the strong personalities and passionate characters, particularly Cathy and Heathcliff."

Having first visited and taken photographs around Haworth in 1990, the artist returned home to Melide in German-speaking Switzerland and over the years has made an interconnected series of images with the help of her two daughters and grandchildren.

In the new show they are displayed around the Parsonage Museum in among the Brontë family's possessions, provoking the viewer to connect the photographs with the objects, people and place that helped to create them.

Strba says she never has a plan as such when she approaches her subject matter. "Everything happens out of feeling and instinct. There's nothing intellectual about what I do."

She talks as though there is nothing at all clever about her work, which is both arresting and bewitching.

Now 61, but an avid photographer since the age of 14, she did not set out to make a career as an artist. Finding herself married to an artist and at home with three young children, Sonja, Samuel and Linda, it came naturally to her to document the little ones in almost a daily diary fashion.

Their sleep, waking and play were captured in thousands of candid images, with no particular use in mind except the creation of a personal record.

But 20 years ago an artist friend who had some of Strba's pictures in his studio showed them to the art director of Basel Art Museum. Three months later Annelies Strba mounted her first show.

Her images often possess a dreamlike quality, the figures in them appearing as though they could be under some kind of spell, or indeed be something only quasi-human. The strange, mythical and other-worldly clearly are very much her stomping ground.

Since accidentally finding herself exhibiting her work on her native soil, Annelies Strba's work has also attracted great acclaim around the globe, with shows at major galleries in Prague (where a retrospective was shown in 2005), Paris, Chicago, Liverpool, and London.

My Life Dreams by Annelies Strba is at the Brontë Parsonage Museum, Haworth, West Yorkshire until October 31, 10am-5.30pm daily. For more information, call 01535 640188 or log on to www.bronte.info