(Gyles) From the epic sweep of the Yorkshire moors... (Johnnie) This is the landscape that sits at the heart of the Brontë story.
(Gyles) ...to the cobbled sprawl of Victorian London...
I can just imagine Dickens walking down this very street.
...and the jagged beauty of the Jurassic Coast... Talk about a cliffhanger!
(wondrous music) ...join me, Gyles Brandreth, as I travel the country to uncover the real life stories... Go on, I'm liking the goss.
...and places... -Where are we now?
-We're in Mad Mary's room.
(Gyles) Good grief, that is amazing!
...that inspired some of our most famous authors.
Charles Dickens, The Brontë Sisters, Thomas Hardy, and Jane Austen.
(woman) We have Jane Austen's writing table.
(Gyles) Wow!
With the help of some friends... -Ah!
-Good afternoon.
...I'll unlock the secrets behind their unforgettable novels... Oh, I love it.
...delve into their lives... (whipping) ...and uncover the true life events that inspired some of the greatest stories ever told.
(woman) The sale of a wife.
(Gyles) Oh, this is literally detective work.
They may be gone, but their tales live on, brought to our TV and cinema screens by some very familiar faces.
♪ So come with me as I discover Britain just as it was written.
That's what I call a story.
♪ (birds chirping) (dramatic music) ♪ The West Yorkshire Moors, so wild, so remote, and the perfect setting for a spot of dramatic storytelling.
♪ Almost, two centuries ago, this landscape was center stage, inspiring a set of thrilling novels, stories created by three remarkable sisters: Charlotte, Emily, and Anne Brontë.
In the years since, their books have been translated into 60 languages and become best sellers on every continent.
With such a global appeal, you might think the sisters themselves were a well-traveled bunch, but not so.
They spent almost their entire lives here in West Yorkshire.
They lived it, they breathed it, they wrote about it.
This area shaped them, and they, in their turn, helped shape it.
So much so that this part of the world is known almost universally as Brontë country.
♪ (Bidisha) It's not possible to separate the Brontës from their landscape.
They were hugely influenced by what was around them up there on the Yorkshire Moors.
Every little change in the vegetation, they noticed it, they enjoyed it.
They really loved the territory where they were, and it worked their way into all of their writing.
(contemplative music) (Gyles) The Brontës' novels have spawned a string of TV and movie adaptations, starring some of the world's greatest actors.
♪ (tense music) The epicenter of the Brontës' world was the ancient village of Howarth on the edge of the Moors.
Once an industrial mill town, it's now a tourist magnet, attracting Brontë fans the world over, as you'll notice within seconds of walking down the main street.
And look at this: Brontë Beers.
There's one for Anne, one for Charlotte, one for Emily, and even one for their brother Branwell.
The sisters moved here as small children when their father, Patrick, was made curate of the local church.
One perk of that job was this house, The Parsonage, where they would live for their rest of their lives.
Ah, here we are.
Home sweet home.
Today it's Brontë central for fans from all over the globe, frozen in time for nearly 130 years, it's also the HQ of the Brontë society, one of the oldest literary clubs in the world.
-So this is the hallway?
-It is.
Well, it's a handsome house.
Uh, who was living here?
(Anne) When they arrived, Patrick Brontë, his wife Mariah, and their six very young children, accompanied by two servants.
-Just two servants?
-Two servants.
(Gyles) For quite a large family.
And it seems quite sort of gentile, refined, I mean, looking at the-- the great man's study here.
(Anne) It is quite gentile, but the family were not wealthy.
They would have had a lot of domestic work to carry out themselves.
Life was hard.
A lot of the work would've been carried out by the women of the family.
Ironing, sewing, baking.
The servants would probably light the fires, um, and do a lot of the washing.
-Was it a close-knit family?
-A very close-knit family.
The siblings were all very close together in age, and they--they had no need of outside friendship when they were growing up.
(Gyles) Cocooned in their own little world upstairs, the Brontë children began to develop their creative talents.
(Anne) This is where they created their imaginary worlds, which were sparked initially by Patrick Brontë buying his son Branwell a set of toy soldiers, and we know from an account that Charlotte wrote that each of the children claimed one of the soldiers.
They gave them names and characters and created a little world around the soldiers called Glass Town.
And they went from, um, acting out tiny plays to writing the stories down in tiny books, which were intended to be small enough for the toy soldiers to read, and I've actually got one here.
This is written by Charlotte Brontë in 1830.
-It's minute.
-It is minute and-- -And that's her handwriting.
-It's her handwriting, and it contains thousands of words.
(Gyles) And how old was she when she created this?
(Anne) She was 14, but this is actually the second series of the young men's magazine, and it consisted of six of these tiny magazines.
Some of them even have even got advertisements in the back.
They're incredibly ambitious.
There are poems, there are stories.
(Gyles) This is phenomenal because what you are telling me is that Charlotte Brontë, the world of, Jane Eyre, the imagination, begins in this tiny room -in this tiny book.
-Yeah, that--that's right.
(Gyles) It's incredible to think that the roots of so many timeless tales were first dreamt up in this very room: Charlotte's Jane Eyre, Emily's Wuthering Heights, Anne's A Tenant of Wildfell Hall.
While the sisters' childhood jottings were private affairs, by their late 20s they decided their talents deserved a wider audience, and started to look for a publisher.
But there was a problem.
They were women.
Back in the mid-19th century, publishers believed the idea of women writing novels was a bit of a turn-off for readers.
That's why they submitted their early work under pseudonyms.
Charlotte became Currer Bell, Emily became Ellis Bell, and Anne was Acton Bell.
(contemplative music) Apparently late into the night, the three of them would stay in here, pacing around the table, exchanging ideas, reading bits out to one another, telling each other stories, correcting one another.
This was Brontë brainstorming.
(dramatic music) And that brainstorming would give birth to some of the greatest stories ever told, books that would make this place world famous, and burn into the memories of everyone who has read them.
(Sheila) I am besotted with all of them.
They are beautiful books about love and passion, and about women struggling to make their voices heard.
(Gyles) Next, I go deep into the wild and windy Moors themselves, the landscape that inspired perhaps the greatest story of them all: Wuthering Heights.
(pensive music) The West Riding of Yorkshire, windswept and baron, and forever linked with the novels of three supremely talented sisters: Charlotte, Emily, and Anne Brontë.
♪ In the 180 years since they fell in love with this landscape, millions more of us have, too.
(Sheila) I can't separate them from the landscape, and it's marvelous and it's staggering.
Their description is so incredibly vivid, that you--you are there.
I can't imagine them anywhere else.
I can't imagine them thriving anywhere else or being able to live anywhere else, even though that landscape is harsh and bleak, and as dangerous as it is beautiful, they do love it.
♪ (Gyles) Over the space of seven years, the sisters wrote seven novels between them.
But one, penned by Emily, has consistently topped polls as the greatest love story of all time.
Well asking someone their favorite Brontë is a pretty unfair question, but overall for sheer gothic, magical, spooky, sexualized storytelling, it's gotta be Wuthering Heights.
(Gyles) It's a story that's enthralled us for generations, but when the novel was published in 1847, the response was, well, mixed.
Some reviewers said the book was fit only to be burnt, and it's not surprising they said that because it was apparently a love story, and yet it was one which depicted love as an utterly destructive and self-destructive passion.
They described it as depraved, uh, as unnatural.
All of the characters are negative, they're sadistic, they're masochistic.
One of my favorites from the weekly newspaper of 1848: "In Wuthering Heights the reader is shocked, disgusted, almost sickened by details of cruelty, inhumanity, and the most diabolical hate and vengeance."
So, there you go.
(Gyles) So where did the inspiration for this controversial page-turner, and other Brontë novels, come from?
The answer lies just a few miles' walk from their home in Howarth.
(birds chirping) Johnnie, good to find you here.
Gyles it's a pleasure to meet you.
(Gyles) Johnnie Briggs is a tour guide for the Brontë experience.
Nobody's explored this area more than him, except maybe the sisters themselves.
This is the landscape that sits at the heart -of the Brontë story.
-Describe the terrain to me.
(Johnnie) Well, you just walked up from Howarth, so you've come through that patchwork of farms and fields.
We've now got to the point where the heather moorland begins.
(Gyles) It's beautiful, it's bleak.
And as a young family, they would know this walk?
(Johnnie) Oh, they would know these moors like the back of their hand.
This is where they really grow up and find their place in the world, and this is what they're bonded to, this landscape.
-What's down there?
-Down there is lovely.
This is the Brontë Falls, and beneath it-- -So called now.
-So, called now, yes.
And what we now call the Brontë bridge, people think of Emily sitting down there on what's called the Emily chair writing poetry.
(Gyles) These landscapes all feature in the novels.
They are the bedrock of the novels.
(Johnnie) People would say that the landscape is an additional character in Wuthering Heights.
(Gyles) If we want to find Heathcliff country... -Oh, ho-ho.
-...we gotta walk a bit further.
(Johnnie) We are going straight up that valley to the top of the Pennines.
From this point on, it gets wilder.
Nature becomes more savage.
The higher up we get the wilder it becomes, and that's where Heathcliff belongs, right up there on the edge of civilization.
(Gyles) My wild inner Heathcliff is stirring.
Lead on.
Ah Heathcliff, the tortured anti-hero of Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights.
(Sheila) Heathcliff is a beast.
A savage, manipulative, cruel man.
(Gyles) In Emily's story, he's a street urchin from Liverpool who was brought up by his adopted family in these moors.
No one loves him except his step sister, Cathy, and an intense and passionate relationship develops between the two of them and their wild surroundings.
(Johnnie) And here we are, Gyles.
(Gyles) Oh my.
This is Wuthering Heights.
Wonderful.
So, Emily knew this, this very view?
(Johnnie) Her idea of Wuthering Heights is it's here on the edge of civilization.
Up there, the blanket bog, nothing else.
Cathy and Heathcliff's playground.
So this is the spot she had in mind where she builds Wuthering Heights.
(Gyles) Well, I've got the book, and I've got the opening paragraph, and there it is: "This is certainly a beautiful country.
In all England, I do not believe that I could have fixed on a situation so completely removed from the stir of society."
Extraordinary.
This book, Wuthering Heights, has conquered the world It's world famous and the story began here.
Top Withens, the name of this ruin, attracts Brontë fans the world over.
On Emily's birthday, they leave flowers by the trunks of these two trees named, of course, Heathcliff and Cathy.
But what about the name, Wuthering?
Where does that come from?
(Johnnie) It really means the cold that comes over you, where the rain cuts your face, where the wind howls around you, and your sense of just being withered by it.
You hunker down as it blasts across you.
(contemplative music) (Gyles) The actual house Emily may have had in mind still lies three miles from her own former home.
♪ Its real name: Ponden Hall.
She and her sisters all knew it well.
They once took shelter here after getting stuck on the Moors in bad weather.
How very Brontë of them.
♪ Well, it's suitably gothic.
Let's see if Mr. Heathcliff's in.
♪ Today Ponden Hall is a B & B and Steve Brown is its owner.
♪ -Hi, good morning, how are you?
-Oh, Steve, -very good to meet you.
-Gyles, nice to meet you, too.
-Nice to meet you, too.
-Now how long have you -been here, Steve?
-Just over 22 years.
And when you got the house, did you know about -the Brontë connections?
-Yes, we did, so yes, it was an easy sell for us really.
(Gyles) And what is the Brontë connection?
(Steve) The Heaton family that lived in here for ten generations, right up until 1898, every generation of the Heaton's were trustees of the church in Howarth, and Robert Heaton and Michael Heaton, in 1820, were on the board of trustees who actually appointed Patrick -to his position.
-Oh, so they, the family here -brought the Brontës to Howarth.
-Yes, absolutely, yes.
They were very young when they first started coming here.
And if you look at the plaque above the door, uh, this plaque tells you the evolution of the house, and it finishes 1801, the very first word in Wuthering Heights.
(Gyles) In the novel, this is where Heathcliff and Cathy grow up together, fall in love, but then split when she marries the local wealthy landowner.
Oh my.
Soon afterwards, she dies, but she makes her most unforgettable appearance right here.
(Steve) Well, this is a very important room in--in the story of Wuthering Heights because this room contains a box bed, and the box bed hides a certain window that's synonymous with Wuthering Heights.
And what is a box bed?
I've never seen a box bed.
-Would you like to see?
-I would like to see -your box bed.
-Come on over.
(Gyles) This is it, how does it work?
(Steve) Well, it's--it's quite simple, you just slide this panel across, -and the box bed's revealed.
-Goodness, it really is.
(Steve) Yeah, absolutely, and that, the window in front of you, that is the-- the famous Cathy window that inspired that scene where the ghost of Cathy smashes through, terrorizing Lockwood the narrator of Wuthering Heights, in the box bed.
She grabs his arm and he has to rake her arm across the broken glass of the window frame, and she disappears just as Heathcliff comes charging through the room.
(Gyles) It's wonderful to think of Emily sitting in this room, looking over at a box bed and through it, looking out that window that features in Wuthering Heights.
It's completely--it's wonderful.
(wind whooshing) Next, the Brontës' school days revisited... Teachers felt that children were inherently naughty, so you actually had to beat the sin out of them.
(Gyles) ...creating one of the most terrifying classrooms ever imagined.
The sheer brutality of Lowood is made clear from the very beginning.
(whipping) (pensive music) West Yorkshire, home to epic, desolate moors, and 180 years ago, being rapidly transformed by the Industrial Revolution.
(clacking) (Juliet) It was surrounded by moorlands, but it was a little industrial town.
There were already 13 working mills in the town when they arrived there.
(Bidisha) It was a poor, dirty, working town.
You could work at the mills or you could weave and spin and sort cloth at home on a home loom, and in fact, lots of workers did that to supplement their income.
(Gyles) Many of Haworth's children were destined for such a life of drudgery, but not the three daughters of the local vicar.
(Bidisha) Because they lived at the parsonage, the Brontë sisters were somewhat saved from that.
They also weren't working class women, so they have a weird, slightly elevated position in the town, and on top of that they are extremely ambitious.
(Gyles) Education wasn't compulsory when the sisters were growing up.
So while most children headed for the mills or farms, they had the rare privilege of going to school.
At the age of 8, Charlotte, the eldest of the three, was packed off to Cowan Bridge as a boarder.
Today the school is a pretty line of B & B cottages, but back in 1824, it was a much scarier place.
This is how the school was described in the Leeds advertiser at the time: "School for clergymen's daughters.
The great object and view will be intellectual and religious improvement, which may best fit the students to return with respectability and advantage to their own homes."
All sounds very worthy and full of good intentions, but this was the inspiration for Lowood School in Charlotte's novel, Jane Eyre.
If you're thinking happiest days of your life, think again.
So, you see Jane Eyre going off to school, she's really excited, she has all these imaginary ideas about this lovely place, and she falls asleep and she's going to wake up -in this lovely environment.
-And she awakes to find herself in a world of sort of Spartan regimentation, where all the girls have to sort of stand and move to order, and a world of utter sort of darkness, plainness, and deprivation.
So, the sheer brutality of Lowood is made clear from the very beginning.
(Gyles) Charlotte was 31 when she wrote the novel, but her memories of school and those in charge of her teaching were clearly still raw.
One of her most memorable creations was Lowood'Mr.s founder.
(Juliet) Mr. Brocklehurst is every child's worst nightmare.
He's this huge black column of a man in his black clothes who towers over you and who misjudges you.
It's such a powerful portrayal of the worst kind of school experience, I think.
(ominous music) (Gyles) When Charlotte's real headmaster from Cowan Bridge read Jane Eyre, he was so angry he threatened to take her to court.
Charlotte did later apologize, but she didn't change a word.
So was she faithfully reflecting her own experience as a pupil?
Some clues, along with an in-character expert, can be found at Haworth's old school rooms.
It's a long time since I last had to report to teacher.
Wish me luck.
Were schools a frightening experience -for children?
-Yes, they were.
The discipline was very, very strict, and, uh, teachers felt that children were inherently naughty, and they believed, as the Bible said, that children were born in sin, so they were sinners, so you actually had to, um, beat the sin out of them.
(Gyles) So the teacher rules by fear?
Absolutely really, yeah, by fear.
And what sort of punishments were at the disposal -of the teachers?
-Well, um, there-- there are some next to you.
They are called finger stocks.
Now finger stocks were for children who fiddled.
If you're a fiddler, then we would put those finger stocks on you.
(Gyles) So like--like this, I would put them on like this?
Yes, but you would have them behind your back, and you would have your hands tied up, and that would definitely stop you fiddling.
-It certainly would.
-It would.
-I see your dunce's cap.
-Yes.
-What is the origin of that?
-This could be administered at any time if you are slow.
Victorian teachers liked everybody to learn at the same pace.
You had to keep up, and if you didn't keep up, you had the dunce's hat put on you, you went in the corner.
The thing about it is it's humiliating.
(Gyles) According to Charlotte, pupils rose at dawn, had lessons from 9:30 to 5:00 each day, with a 6-mile walk on Sundays.
If they misbehaved, they'd be locked in or worse, be caned.
Do we know how frequently these punishments -were imposed on children?
-Oh, every day, all day.
When you think of it, you wonder whether the teachers actually got joy and pleasure from it.
Children had a very, very difficult upbringing in Victorian times.
(Gyles) Surprisingly, when Charlotte left school, aged 16, her links with education weren't over.
It was time to pass on what she had learnt to others, first as a teacher, then as a governess.
(quirky music) For young women like Charlotte, there were some perks to the job.
As the private teachers of wealthy children, they got to live in fine homes, and they were considered a cut above the common servants.
Nevertheless, it wasn't exactly a bed of roses.
Well, it wasn't a great lot.
There's a bit of a misconception that I think it was a very happy life, and it wasn't.
It was a very hard job and it was a very hard life.
It was long hours.
You were given a lot of responsibility without authority.
You were responsible for teaching and educating, uh, pupils in a range of subjects, but also in their moral well being.
And you were in a strange position because you were part of a household, part of a family, but you weren't a servant, and you weren't part of the family itself.
(Gyles) Despite the drawbacks, both Emily and Anne followed Charlotte in taking up posts as governesses.
If it was so tough, why did the Brontë girls -want to take it on?
-I don't think it was so much that it was a want, it was there were few opportunities for women of their class, unmarried women of their class.
Patrick had three daughters.
Neither--none of them had married at the time they started writing, and they were essentially dependent on their father, and for the Brontës, that meant being a governess was one of the few occupations that they could take up.
To be self sufficient, to be economically independent was important, and that's why they did it.
(Gyles) But the job didn't only benefit Charlotte financially, it gave her great material for her novels.
In her blockbusting Jane Eyre, the main character also leaves school to become a governess.
Her destination: Thornfield Hall, home to the wealthy Mr. Rochester.
(Lady Graham) Welcome to a gentleman's manor house.
(Gyles) Well, thank you for welcoming me to Thornfield.
Next, is this the real house Charlotte based it on?
And what's the truth behind the story's most haunting character, the madwoman in the attic?
(Bidisha) She's hidden away, and every so often things go bump in the night, and it's Bertha.
(screaming) (Tim) She doesn't ever even say a line, and you hear her screaming and cackling... (cackling) ...which is quite terrifying actually.
(screaming) (Gyles) Britain, 1847.
Queen Victoria's been on the throne for nearly a decade, the Industrial Revolution is at its height, and up in Yorkshire, the Brontë sisters have just published their blockbuster novels.
Along with Emily's Wuthering Heights come Charlotte's Jane Eyre Jane Eyre's a really interesting novel because it seems very prim and proper on the surface, just like its heroine, but, then all these-- these weird things happen.
(Gyles) Charlotte based the early part of her story on her miserable experiences as a child at boarding school.
For the later part, she is said to have chosen this as the setting: Norton Conyers, a medieval manor house in North Yorkshire.
So just to give you a little breakdown, in the book, Jane takes up the position of governess at Thornfield, the ancestral pile of a certain Mr. Rochester.
He's a frosty character, to put it mildly, but the inevitable happens and love blossoms, but given this is Brontë country, there are, of course, stumbling blocks along the way, including the resident hidden mad woman, Mr. Rochester's wife.
(quirky music) Today's residents are Sir James and Lady Graham, who have kindly agreed to show me around.
Oh, here you are.
I'm very excited to see you both.
-Thank you so much.
-Welcome to a gentleman's manor house.
(Gyles) Well, thank you for welcoming me to Thornfield.
And am I roughly right that I have just walked along the pathway that, uh, Charlotte Brontë would have walked when she lived in these parts?
(Lady Graham) Well, the carriage would have deposited her here, 'cause this is a carriage stripe, and it is, in fact, the same way that Jane Eyre came to Norton Conyers.
(Gyles) The house has belonged to the Graham family for almost 400 years.
Charlotte visited in her early 20s when she was a governess in the neighborhood.
So let's see how it compares to the detailed description of Rochester's pad in her infamous novel.
And I've got the bit where she is describing Thornfield the first time she seen it, as it were, by daylight.
"Traversing the long and matted gallery," that's exactly where you bought me, "I descended the slippery steps of oak."
Well, its oak and you warned me they were slippery.
So let's go down.
"Then I gained the hall", which is exactly what we're doing.
"I halted there a minute.
I looked at some pictures on the walls.
One, I remember, represented a grim man in a cuirass..." That's a armored breastplate.
"...and one lady with powdered hair and a pearl necklace."
And where is she?
-There they are.
-Oh, she's up there.
Extraordinary-- anything else in the hall?
(Lady Graham) Oh, yes, there are the doors of half glass.
(Gyles) Oh yes, it's the next sentence: "The hall door, which was half of glass, stood open.
I stepped over the threshold.
It was a fine autumn morning."
We've come on the right day!
Do you know, you've even managed to find us Brontë weather.
Okay, so what about the elephant in the room, or to be more precise, the mad woman in the attic known in the book as Bertha Mason?
(mysterious music) So Bertha Mason is Mr. Rochester's wife, but the wife that he has been tricked into marrying, as he later tells Jane, and who has become mad.
(Bidisha) She is hidden away, she is looked after by a nurse guardian maid called Grace Pool, and every so often things go bump in the night and it's Bertha.
You hear her screaming and cackling, uh, which is quite terrifying actually.
♪ -Well, where are we now?
-We're in Mad Mary's room.
(Gyles) Mad Mary's room?
This is the furthermost point of the house?
(Lady Graham) Yes, and it's a cul-de-sac.
(Gyles) Why do you call it Mad Mary's room?
(Lady Graham) Uh, because by family tradition, a mad woman was incarcerated in this attic in the mid-18th century.
-Goodness.
-We don't know who Mad Mary was.
We don't know if she was a member of the family, or whether she was a servant, whether it was somebody who had postnatal depression.
Whoever she was, I think it would have been very unpleasant here.
(Gyles) Mad Mary could well be the inspiration for Mrs. Rochester locked away in the-- (Lady Graham) Yes, yes.
That's quite possible.
(Gyles) In bringing her character to life, Charlotte was reflecting one of the obsessions of Victorian life: The fear and loathing of mental illness.
She herself was fascinated by it and its effects on her brother, Branwell.
Evidence for that can be found back in her hometown of Howarth.
(dramatic music) This place really is full of curiosities, isn't it?
(Nick) It really is--now this is the old apothecary shop.
-Mhm.
-and it was used by the Brontë family, who lived across the street, in effect, but especially by Branwell Brontë, because amongst its many drugs it dispensed was laudanum, which is a mixture of opium and alcohol.
-Which was legal in those days?
-It was legal.
But he was dependent on it?
He--he was, in a word, unfortunately.
(Gyles) And he had a range of mental issues, didn't he?
He had problems in childhood.
His mother died when he was young.
And he wanted to be an artist, he wanted to be a poet, and he never achieved the heights he wanted to there.
He had problems in his love life.
Uh, and all of these things helped, uh, tip him really into, um, mental health problems, and then into addiction to alcohol and laudanum.
And were his sisters interested in mental health issues?
(Nick) They had no choice but to be interested in Branwell's problems-- they loved him dearly, but as we can see from their writing, they were really interested in mental health in general, and Victorian society was learning more and more about mental health.
(pensive music) (Gyles) Charlotte's interest in mental illness can be found in this medicine book, complete with hand-written scrawls by her father.
This is Patrick Brontë's hand, is it?
-This is.
-Oh, goodness, insanity.
(Nick) He gives symptoms as sleeplessness, shouting, singing, obscene language, bulging eyes, and really it's a description of Bertha, Rochester's mad wife in Jane Eyre.
(Gyles) Oh, so Charlotte, as it were, gets the clues to give the symptoms to the character in the book.
-I believe so, yes.
-So this book -is part of her story?
-It is.
(contemplative music) (Gyles) The more I tread in the Brontë's footsteps the more autobiographical their novels seem.
These strange, dark tales weren't flights of fancy.
Every character, every plot twist, every location is grounded in the lives of the Brontës themselves.
Next, how the youngest of the sisters, Anne, drew on these same surroundings to create her own masterpiece, a tale so disturbing it was even condemned by her family.
(John) The abusiveness of the marriage into which, Helen, the hero, blunders was felt to be shocking not just by reviewers, but actually by Anne Brontë's own sister, Charlotte.
(suspenseful music) (Gyles) 170 years ago, West Yorkshire's wild landscape became familiar to the entire country as Brontë blockbusters began hitting the bookshelves.
Even in today's online age, Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre remain best sellers whether as books or as downloads.
♪ (Bidisha) People are mad about the Brontës.
Why?
Because they deal with completely universal themes.
Love, death, birth, family birthright, wealth, trying to survive, trying to work.
(Gyles) These themes found in Emily's Wuthering Heights and Charlotte's Jane Eyre made their passionate tales instant classics.
But, of course, the Brontë brand wasn't just established by two sisters.
There were three in this literary crowd.
Anne Brontë was the youngest.
She published her first novel, Agnes Grey, at 27, but it was a year later, shortly after her elder sister's success, that she came up with her own best seller.
Its name: The Tenant of Wildfell Hall.
It's a corker-- for those who need a reminder, picture this: A mysterious young woman with a small child suddenly takes up residence in a ruined stately home in the middle of the Moors, Wildfell Hall.
Who is she?
What's her story?
All very Brontëian.
A young local chap is intrigued.
There's love, there's hate, there's suspicion, until her secret is revealed.
She is in hiding, the victim of an abusive relationship with a drunken brute of a husband.
For some readers, even including Anne's older sister, Charlotte, this novel was a case of an author overstepping the mark.
She depicted Anne's writing as being a mistake, and that's the word that she used for The Tenant of Wildfell Hall.
An entire mistake.
There may have been a sense that in writing about women who actually leave abusive men and take the kids with them, that they were going against just everything Christian Victorian society said that a good wife and mother should be.
(melancholic music) (Gyles) Anne didn't experience the controversy for long.
Just a year after publication in 1849, she contracted a severe chest infection and died.
She was just 29.
(Russel) Who knows what Anne Brontë would have gone on to write, yet she might have gone on to smash out an absolute classic, aged 35, aged--aged 40.
Most writers don't-- fiction writers don't do anything worth reading till they're about 40.
♪ (Gyles) After Anne's death, Charlotte placed a ban on further publication of the book, but she herself continued to write.
For her next novel, she chose the Industrial Revolution and the sweeping changes it was bringing to her Yorkshire homeland.
(clanking) The novel was called Shirley, named after the book's heroine.
She becomes friends with a mill owner who installs new machinery, threatening the jobs of workers who then launch an attack in protest.
Charlotte based it on real events that took place here in Liversedge, 16 miles from her own home.
This may not look like an historic building, but it is.
Now I've just read this novel, Shirley.
Why are we here at this pub in relation to this book?
So, this is the pub where the Luddites hatch their plan to go and break that machinery, and it's based on an attack which actually took place at Rawfolds Mill, which is very close to here, which is why the Croppers met here, and it's that story that Charlotte Brontë uses as the basis for Shirley.
(Gyles) Now, Croppers, Luddites.
Who are the Croppers, what are the Luddites?
-What's this all about?
-So the Luddites are a group of workers in the early 19th century who break machines because those machines are taking their jobs.
Jobs that were once done by hand are now being done increasingly by machines.
(Gyles) And how many men are put out of work -by one machine?
-It could devastate a whole community.
-So hundreds of jobs are going?
-Yeah.
-Being replaced by machines.
-Yeah, because a machine can do in an hour what, you know, men would do in a day or week.
(Gyles) The attack by the Luddites proved to be a disaster.
Not only did they fail to stop the rise of the machines, 17 of them were arrested, tried, and later executed.
(Dr. Roberts) They came a cropper, which is supposedly where that phrase comes from.
-The croppers came a cropper.
-Yeah.
-Ah, poor them.
-Yeah.
(Gyles) Now, how does Charlotte Brontë know about this?
(Dr. Roberts) She decides in the 1840s, as many socially aware novelists do at this time, that she wants to explore the plight of the working classes.
Because, although we're now 20, 30 years after Luddism, she's aware that the local Wilcomers in and around Haworth, are in a very similar situation to what the Luddites have been before, so she decides to send off for all the back files of the Leeds Mercury from the time of the luddites.
She bases the attack on what happens at Rawfolds, -very close to here.
-So we think of her as a sort of gothic novelist, and a romantic novelist, and a mystery writer, but in fact, she's also a political novelist.
-Very much so, yeah.
-How interesting.
(pensive music) ♪ The Luddite revolts weren't just good fodder to pad out a novel.
It's clear that, once again, a Brontë sister was writing about a subject that was local and deeply personal to her.
But no subjects were closer to the family than disease and death.
Next, why they cast such a shadow over their lives and their writings.
(Bidisha) In the Brontës' novels, pretty much everyone dies.
(Gyles) West Yorkshire, home of the Brontës, the place where they found their ideas, and then let their imaginations run riot.
They adored it, but they knew what its beauty concealed.
(Sheila) They did see a lot of the cruel side of life, and by God, they put it in their books.
(Gyles) In an era when life was tough and short, there were plenty of bleak themes for them to explore.
And if there's one theme that dominates all three sisters' books, its death and disease.
They were obsessed.
Characters seem to drop like flies as the pages turn.
(John) In Wuthering Heights, Cathy dies shortly after giving birth.
Jane Eyre, dead parents.
Edgar dies.
Well, he's a weakling, he's bound to.
Dead school friend whose body she discovers.
Uh, Heathcliff, incredibly sort of strong, vibrant, violent man.
He just goes outside and dies.
In the Brontës' novels, pretty much everyone dies.
(Gyles) If a clue to this morbid fascination lies anywhere, it's in Haworth's Church Cemetery, a place that once kept their father, the local vicar, very busy.
(solemn music) So beautiful here and peaceful, and yet it's clear, looking around, that this is a very crowded graveyard.
The modern village and the old village would have been small and peaceful, but it was more like a mill town in the Brontës' day.
They needed extra space to start packing in people, burying between the church and the parsonage -where they lived.
-Oh, and yet people dying in 1830s, 1840s, many of them, I can see, were small children.
The average age of death was incredibly young.
Almost inner city sort of proportions around here.
-And why was that?
-The sanitation was very poor.
They think that some of the streams and the Moors that were feeding down into wells in the village were passing through graves and contaminating them -on the way down.
-Because there are thousands of people buried here.
I mean, he was burying people several times a week, wasn't he?
(Reverend Mullins) Several times a week and often small children.
(Gyles) For the sisters who lived right opposite, seeing their father conduct these almost constant burials was a reminder that death could come at any time.
(Reverend Mullins) Although there's a wall there now, there's a marker that that's where the gate was, so they would be walking up and down this path.
Oh, literally, several times a week, -going to church?
-Yes.
(Gyles) They would walk up and down here.
(Reverend Mullins) And the new graves being buried would have been either side of them every time they went.
(Gyles) Wow, so truly in the midst of life there is death, and it's all--all around them.
(grim music) ♪ Walking down these quaint cobbled streets, it's hard to imagine how appalling the conditions were back then.
But apparently in 1850, there were just 69 privies, lavatories, for the entire village.
That's about one for every five households, and from the moors, the water poured down into the village, making many of the houses damp, and they even had to drink water from the open drains.
It was deadly.
Sadly, the Brontës themselves weren't immune from tragedy.
Now, this is the memorial stone that was created by Patrick Brontë for his family, and just look how much death there is here.
First of all, his wife dies, coming up for 39.
And their daughter Maria, how old is she?
Coming up for 12.
And then Elizabeth, coming up for 11.
And then Branwell, how old is he?
He dies at thirty 31.
Emily dies aged 30.
Uh, Anne dies aged 29.
And finally, Charlotte, how old is she?
She dies in her 39th year.
It's heartbreaking.
So much tragedy in one family and so much talent.
What might have been if those three girls had gone on writing?
What other masterpieces could we be reading now?
Huh.
Just 40 years after they arrived in Haworth, the entire Brontë family was dead and buried.
But the sisters' impact would continue.
By 1858, three years after Charlotte's death, the first Brontë biography was published.
Immediately following that best seller, 25,000 new copies of Jane Eyre were published to meet demand.
In the 1860s, the railway arrived in Haworth, and tens of thousands of tourists began flocking here to explore the backdrop to their stories.
In the 1890s, the Brontë Society was founded.
And throughout the 20th century, their books would be turned into a string of box office smash films, for the Brontës had secured their place in our culture and Yorkshire's place in our imagination.
These sisters create a kind of world, a pulsing, vital, imaginative world, which is still is alive for us on the page today as it ever was.
(Russell) With the Brontës you are transported not just to the Moors, but your experience to the interior landscape of a woman in the 1800s.
It's like time travel.
(Sheila) I am obsessed with the Brontës, I have to say.
And the landscape is all part of it.
I can't imagine those stories set anywhere else, I really can't.
(uplifting music) (Gyles) The Brontë sisters didn't just place this landscape in their books, they put it on the map, and so long as the world continues to read their extraordinary novels, this will forever be Brontë country.
♪