Brontës sisters: Author Tracy Chevalier to talk on how treasure trove collection sheds light on how the Brontës became Yorkshire’s most famous literary family

“You have three great writers in one family…and it’s worth exploring how that happens and what it is about a specific family that makes them grow into being such good storytellers and such good wordsmiths,” Chevalier says.

Her own interest in the family began when she first read Jane Eyre as a university student in Ohio. After moving to the UK, she visited the Brontës’ home at Haworth Parsonage, and the Airedale landscape and the traces of their harsh childhood in the house renewed her fascination with Charlotte, Emily, Anne and their brother Branwell.

By then, the author of titles including Girl with a Pearl Earring had published her first book, and felt a particular admiration for Charlotte, who had battled financial instability, bereavement and misogyny to get her own books into print – at first under a male pseudonym.

Come 2016, Chevalier was creative partner at the Brontë Parsonage Museum for Charlotte’s bicentenary, curating an exhibition and editing a short story anthology inspired by Jane Eyre. Now she is returning to Yorkshire to illuminate the family's lives and legacy through objects currently on display at the University of Leeds’ Treasures of the Brotherton Gallery.

The gallery’s name is more than apt for an exhibition showcasing a lost treasure trove of Brontë riches. Running until October 28, Becoming the Brontës opens a window onto the writers’ imaginative world as it took shape, revealed by the precocious siblings in handwritten books, letters, sketches and poems.

Many of the items on display come from the Blavatnik Honresfield Library – a unique literary collection assembled by a Rochdale mill owner in the 19th-century, and saved for the nation in a campaign led by the Friends of the National Libraries and a consortium of libraries and writers’ houses including the co-curators of the exhibition – the British Library, Brontë Parsonage Museum and the University of Leeds’ Brotherton Library.

"These new manuscripts, publications and pictures can really help us to see how the Brontës were imagining themselves as published writers right from childhood,” says Dr Katy Mullin, senior lecturer in the University’s School of English. “They are very interesting to us because they give us this insight into how the Brontës were before they were known.

"Back in the early 1840s, they were unknown, pretty much penniless governesses, daughters of a country parson, without their mother who had passed away when they were little girls, with this alcoholic brother Branwell who was making a nuisance of himself all over Yorkshire. Their futures did not look bright and yet these acquisitions show the course of their imagination, their creativity, and a remarkable amount of self-belief and confidence in their abilities.”

Star items in the collection include eight miniature books crafted and written in minuscule script by a young Charlotte, and ten-year-old Emily’s pencil sketch that shows a small hand reaching through a broken window, evoking the later image of Cathy grasping Lockwood’s hand in Wuthering Heights.

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. We will be exploring what they were like and how these objects emerged from this hothouse of creativity.”

"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.”

On the Brontës: Tracy Chevalier in conversation with Dr Katy Mullin will take place in the Esther Simpson Building at the University of Leeds from 6.30pm on October 3. For tickets, visit library.leeds.ac.uk/events