The Brontë Cabinet: Three Lives in Nine Objects by Deborah Lutz, book review

Plenty to treasure in a poignant family portrait

Norton £17.99

Exploring famous lives through objects is the latest fashion in biography. At its worst, this genre is less satisfying than a full biography and brings little new to existing scholarship. However, at its best, as in Deborah Lutz's The Brontë Cabinet, it can provide a fresh and enlightening insight.

In Lutz's version of Howarth Revisited, we get a real feel of what it was like to live in the world of Charlotte, Emily and Anne Brontë. The banality of domestic chores ran parallel to their extraordinary, imaginative lives. The image of Emily putting down her iron to jot down an extract of Wuthering Heights on a scrap of paper, or of Charlotte dripping ink from her pen on to her portable writing desk in her fervour to write Jane Eyre, are unforgettable pictures. This book is an exceptionally intimate study of the three sisters, through it we look into the most private corners of the parsonage.

After setting the objects in the Brontës' biographical context, Lutz explores how similar items appeared in their novels. Her knowledge of their writing is comprehensive and she seamlessly stitches extracts from their fiction and poetry into the text. Each item is then set in the wider context of Victorian culture. Through the blackthorn walking stick Emily used when she needed to free her body and mind by walking on the moors, Lutz explores how the Brontës drew on the Romantic poets Wordsworth and Coleridge's ideas of walking in remote landscapes as part of the aesthetic education of writers. Haworth locals became used to the Brontë girls striding out in their heavy boots. However, as Jane Eyre's experience shows, a woman walking alone could be viewed with suspicion; it could be seen as a rebellion against society's conventions.

Emily's dog Keeper's brass collar provides the starting point for one of the most original sections of the book. Unlike many Victorians who sentimentalised their pets, Emily was drawn to fierce creatures with unyielding natures. Reserved with humans, she was more emotional with her bull mastiff. Lutz suggests that in Wuthering Heights Emily challenged the settled boundaries between humans and animals. The novel portrays a savage world and Heathcliff's brutality reminds us of our ties to animals.

The most poignant item in the "cabinet" is the amethyst bracelet made from the entwined hair of Emily and Anne. After her two sisters died within a few months of each other in 1848-49, Lutz suggests that Charlotte probably wore this bracelet to carry on a physical link with her sisters, as if to touch them wherever they were.

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