[ Button clicks ] ♪ Hey!

♪ ♪♪ -I'm Anita Rani, and all my life, I've been obsessed with the Brontes.

-There's a very rude joke in there.

-What kind of joke?

-It's a knob gag, Anita.

-A knob -- [ Both laugh ] These three Yorkshire sisters had as much impact on me growing up as Nirvana and Neneh Cherry.

If she'd had Instagram or Twitter, I can guarantee the amount of women that would have got in touch with her to say, "I read your novel."

As one of the few Asian girls in my school and a misfit, they made me believe I could do anything.

-If a woman could do it in 1849, it generates possibilities.

-Now I'm going home to Bradford to find out how and why they changed my world and the lives of so many others.

The word "rage" is used.

-Yeah.

She's trapped in this position.

-Yes.

I want to discover what filled them with rage and made them shock society.

-So, the streets were literally running with blood.

-So they were surrounded by death.

-They looked out of their front yard, and it was right here.

-What was it about their short and tragic lives that made them so disruptive?

-This is not the kind of image that we traditionally have of Charlotte Bronte.

-And quite punk, I'd say.

It's like, "Alright, you thought that was shocking?

I'll shock you even more."

Creating stories that cause scandals with their references to gender equality and race.

-He doesn't look the way that he does in those adaptations.

-In the books.

The novel's been whitewashed.

Nearly two centuries after Charlotte, Emily, and Anne changed the course of literature, I want to find out just why they continue to resonate to this day.

I'm just gonna get a Bronte tattoo after this.

Do you know what I thought about all of that?

Pbht!

[ Laughs ] ♪♪ [ Beeping ] Welcome to "Woman's Hour" with me, Anita Rani.

On the program today... [ Dog barking ] [ Static hisses ] The Brontes have always been in my life.

I remember always knowing, before having even read any of the Brontes, that I really loved them and that there was always a mystery around them.

I've always seen them as women who were raging against something and were broody and mysterious and a little bit sad and tragic.

I love that, in growing up in Yorkshire, that's who we were spoon-fed from day one.

We were told about the Brontes, these amazing sisters who lived on the moors in the parsonage.

[ Vehicles passing ] [ Indistinct conversations ] The National Portrait Gallery in London is home to the only surviving portrait of the sisters, painted by their brother Branwell when he was 17.

It's one of the most popular paintings in the gallery's collection and a fitting start for my journey.

This is where my own connection and my story, if you like, with the Brontes began.

A print of this was at my primary school.

It would loom large over me in my class, and I would stare at it for ages.

I mean, it's etched in my mind.

From a really young age, I have known about these incredible, mysterious, dark, brooding three sisters.

I was so fascinated by the portrait and the images in it.

None of them are looking at the artist.

They're all looking off into the middle distance, but I'm staring into their eyes intently, and I see fire.

You know, these are not vacant stares.

This is passion.

And then this bit in the middle that they thought was a column.

And then over the years, of its own accord, revealed that it was Branwell.

I used to make up ghost stories about Branwell.

Scary alcoholic brother, mysterious, painted this portrait, and then this ghostly figure emerges.

Did he paint himself out?

Did they have him painted out?

And actually, it's not just a painting of the three sisters.

It's a painting of all four siblings.

I've always had an attachment to not just the story of the Brontes, but the painting itself.

So, to be here as an adult, about to embark on a journey of discovery, you know, to make a documentary about them, it's -- it's a -- it's mystical.

♪♪ ♪♪ I love this train journey.

I've been doing it for over 20 years, and there's something about leaving London knowing that I'm heading to Yorkshire.

It's like my frequency lowers a little bit, and today I'm particularly excited because I'm heading to the moors in the footsteps of the Brontes to discover more about who these three sisters were, where their ideas came from, how they got the confidence to really push those taboo subjects -- the oppression of women, patriarchy.

They were pushing a feminist agenda, I would say quite a punk agenda, nearly 180 years ago.

The strength of character to be able to do that back then.

Can I say something really honest?

Even as a British broadcaster who's got to this level where I'm presenting "Woman's Hour," I never thought that it was a space that I could get into.

I feel like there is something about the great British literary heroes that are the preserve of someone else, that their stories are for me, but not for me to tell.

Literature for so long hasn't just been the preserve of a certain section of white society.

It's very elitist.

That's how I've been made to feel my entire life.

And so it's amazing that I am not only reclaiming Yorkshire, but I can also stake my claim to the Brontes, as well.

Ah, if only we could just go and have a cup of tea with them now.

Wouldn't that be good?

♪♪ First time I read "Wuthering Heights" was just like nothing I'd ever read before.

It felt like I was being allowed into a world that was just so adult, scary, but sexy.

And I remember reading it with a torch under my duvet because, obviously, once the lights are out, you're meant to go to bed.

I think I was too immature to really read into Heathcliff and what a complex character and a misogynist he was.

But I really loved the romantic, beyond-death love story of Cathy and Heathcliff.

Also, I read Heathcliff as being not white, and that instantly put a completely different spin on it because, in my mind, he was an outsider like me.

People just knew that he wasn't like them, and that felt really relatable.

-"Heathcliff, you're fit for a prince in disguise.

Who knows but your father was Emperor of China, and your mother an Indian queen, each of them able to buy up, with one week's income, Wuthering Heights and Thrushcross Grange together?

And you were kidnapped by wicked sailors and brought to England.

Were I in your place, I would frame high notions of my birth."

♪♪ -I'm on my way to Haworth, but can't resist one brief detour through my home city.

These streets are paved with my memories.

My story is this city.

It is who I am.

Should I move back?

[ Laughs ] In the '80s and '90s, my parents were in the rag trade.

They had a factory in the center of town where I spent much of my childhood, and I haven't seen this place for nearly 30 years.

This is very surreal for me.

Every day after school, we would come here until the day's work was done, which was often quite late.

The top floor was where all the material was cut, and the second floor -- that's where the seamstresses sat, about 25 of them, and that's where I would eavesdrop and listen in to their stories.

And a lot of them had very traumatic lives.

These were migrant women, first-generation.

We're talking about brown women in the '80s who I think society didn't just ignore them.

They didn't see them, didn't care.

They were irrelevant.

I realize that's probably one of the first spaces where I understood the real struggle that women were going through at that time.

There was a lot of pain, a lot of joy, a lot of sisterhood and solidarity, and what can come from women talking together and sharing their pain.

There's a lot of memories in this building, and I suppose that's where, you know, reading "Wuthering Heights" or "Jane Eyre" as a teenager, why was I able to really understand the pain of Cathy or Jane Eyre wanting that independence?

It's obviously because I knew something about women and the struggles that they had from this building.

[ Birds chirping ] ♪♪ When I was at primary school, that's the first time we went to visit the Bronte Parsonage.

We went to Haworth, and that really stayed with me.

The story of the sisters who lived in this parsonage that became world-famous writers really struck a chord with me.

It's my first visit to the Bronte Parsonage since my primary school days.

I want to find out about the sisters' early lives and how their work was shaped by living here.

[ Bird cawing ] -"Must I from day to day sit chained to this chair, prisoned within these four bare walls, while these glorious summer suns are burning in heaven and the year is revolving in its richest glow and declaring at the close of every summer day the time I am losing will never come again?"

-I think we want to understand a bit about who the sisters were and what they got up to growing up here.

-Outwardly, they were the quiet, respectable daughters of a clergyman.

But behind closed doors, they created this extraordinary world of the imagination, which was full of illicit passion and all kinds of intrigue, which got more and more sophisticated as they got older.

And so everything they read, everything they heard kind of fed into this imaginary world.

-How important was their education?

And what were they consuming?

-Education was hugely important to them.

It enabled Patrick Bronte to leave a fairly poor background and become a respectable, middle-class Church of England clergyman.

And all the children inherited that kind of passion.

They devoured newspapers, magazines, anything that they could get their hands on.

-And what were the life options for young women like them at that time?

-Limited.

So, for middle-class, educated women who were poor enough to need to work for a living, the only option was teaching, either in a school or in a private household as a governess.

-Did they enjoy it?

-No.

-Ugh!

-So, we've got a page here from Charlotte's "Roe Head Journal."

It's really quite moving... -Oh, my goodness.

-...because she's describing her frustration.

And she's conscious that all this time that she's wasting in the school is never gonna come to her again.

-Goodness me.

-She's saying here, "Am I to spend all the best part of my life in this wretched bondage..." -"...forcibly suppressing my rage at the idleness, the apathy, and the hyperbolic and most asinine stupidity of these fat headed oafs."

-Wow.

The word "rage" is used.

-Yeah.

-You really feel for her.

-She's trapped in this position.

-Yes.

-Charlotte was the really ambitious sister.

She knew that they'd all got talents, and she wanted them to put those talents to the best use.

And then you've got Emily.

She just wanted to be living her imaginary world in her head.

And then you've got Anne, the youngest, who was always pretty much regarded as the baby of the family.

But she had a very quiet sort of inner strength and integrity.

1847 -- that was the really big year in the Bronte story.

Charlotte's "Jane Eyre" published under the pseudonym Currer Bell to instant acclaim.

And that was followed at the end of the year in December by "Wuthering Heights," by Ellis Bell and Agnes Gray, by Acton Bell.

They were aware that there was a double standard in the way books were reviewed at the time.

So they adopted pseudonyms which were intended to be androgynous.

They wanted to just avoid the whole discussion of their gender.

-How ahead of their time.

-Mm.

The fact that they were kind of writing from behind a mask, using the pseudonyms, freed them up to write as they really wanted to.

-Clever.

I'm just gonna get a Bronte tattoo after this.

[ Laughter ] This entire experience is -- it's almost spiritual.

On a personal level, I can relate to them.

It's almost like they were thoroughly modern women, but society just hadn't caught up with them.

And that was deeply infuriating -- enraging, in fact -- because society has -- and still does -- has these huge expectations of women, and we're supposed to fit in to the conditioning.

But why the hell should we?

The view of the graveyard from the parsonage and of its daily funerals must have impacted on the sisters.

I wonder if this is what inspired the gothic tone of their novels and a desperate need to escape to the moors.

[ Bird cawing ] ♪♪ -"Report to the General Board of Health, Haworth, 1850, by Benjamin Herschel Babbage, Esquire."

"The practice at Haworth is to cover the grave with a flat stone, upon which is engraved the name, age, and et cetera of the dead.

And the churchyard presents one entire surface of flat stones laid at different heights from the ground.

This practice is a very bad one, as it prevents the access of atmospheric air to the ground, which is necessary for promoting decomposition."

-Haworth is a quintessential Yorkshire town.

However, take us back 200 years.

-It was smelly, it was grim, and it was full of death.

Patrick Bronte was constantly campaigning in his life, and he wrote a series of reports and petitions to the General Board of Health.

A chap called Benjamin Herschel Babbage came, and he spent three days here.

And he was horrified by what he saw.

There wasn't a drainage system, and there weren't sewers.

So a lot of people would throw out all of their waste into the streets, as well as excrement and material from slaughterhouses.

So the streets were literally running with blood and all kinds of horror that you can't even imagine today.

And this is part of what Patrick Bronte was campaigning against because he knew that the horrible conditions were impacting people's health as well as the smell, which would have been horrendous, including from this graveyard.

[ Birds cawing ] In the 19th century, there's a huge amount of death from lots of illnesses.

You can imagine Patrick Bronte was constantly performing funerals, and that meant that there was only this cemetery and people were being piled up.

So, one of the things that the Babbage report called for was better sanitation.

The idea was that, if we plant trees and we put more vegetation in there, that will naturally soak up the fluids that are otherwise spilling down the street into the town and into people's water supply.

-Please tell me they weren't drinking it.

-Unfortunately, they were.

The water here was completely contaminated.

-It's starting to shape up, what the three sisters would have seen around them.

You often wonder where this Gothic imagery, the darkness in their books, comes from.

-One of the most radical things about the Brontes is their escape into their imagination is never just imagination.

They're fascinated by drawing on realism and kind of narratives around the village.

Charlotte and Emily Bronte joined their older sisters at the Cowan Bridge School in 1824, and very quickly Maria and Elizabeth got ill.

They died within a couple of months of coming home from tuberculosis, and that's partly because the conditions there were terrible.

And that exposure to seeing sickness and ill health finds its expression in their novels.

Charlotte very famously went on to fictionalize her older sister Maria through the character Helen Burns in "Jane Eyre," and Helen is Jane's best friend at school.

But those early scenes in the novel are essentially a recreation of real life.

They're a recreation of her sister's experience at Cowan Bridge and, of course, then her death.

-Yeah, and in a really shocking way, that she fell asleep with her and wakes up in the -- and she's dead in bed.

-And it's across all of their novels.

We see different forms of contagion and sickness... -Yeah.

-...children and adults.

-So, they were surrounded by death, basically, weren't they?

-They looked out of their front yard, and it was right here.

One of the great things about the Brontes archive that we have is a lot of surviving letters, and Charlotte's letters are full of commentary about health and her obsession with the weather.

And one of the things that comes up again and again is her obsession with kind of the way the wind's blowing, which, again, was connected to ideas of miasma.

Miasma was a theory connected to health and disease, and it was believed that there were poisonous and toxic vapors, that they would contribute to the disease.

Her younger sister, Anne Bronte, had asthma.

So, you can see a correlation in her letters between Charlotte always commenting about the way the wind's blowing and then how it's impacting Anne's lungs and Anne's health in general.

So it makes sense of why they were out on those moors getting the fresh air.

[ Wind whipping ] ♪♪ -One of the best things about my childhood was growing up with access to the moors.

And we would use them as a family pretty much every weekend.

This is relief from inner-city Bradford or, in my case, the suburbs.

Everything feels claustrophobic down there, but up here there's a sense of liberation and freedom.

And especially as a kid, we could just run around.

We'd bring a ball, a picnic.

A Punjabi picnic -- samosa, Bronte, pakora, ketchup.

[ Chuckles ] We'd often be the only Asian family out here.

And my mum and dad just not caring.

It was my dad that taught me to drive.

And so we had L-plates on the car from the age of 15.

As soon as I passed my test, there was only one place that I wanted to be.

So I jumped in my beat-up old Astra, in my Doc Martens, with my New Model Army cassette, and just drove here.

There are so many parallels I can draw with the Brontes.

They were out on this landscape for days and days, and I can completely identify with that.

Whatever I felt or however I was made to feel at home with my family or at school or wherever -- even walking around the center of Bradford -- here, none of that mattered.

Here, I could just be me and be with my thoughts.

And my thoughts were looking out on that horizon and dreaming all the places that I could be and all the things that I could do.

For women 200 years ago, society so structured -- you know, I know that feeling.

I was brought up with a society that was equally as rigorous and had conditioned me.

And I was just full of rage.

"It is in vain to say human beings ought to be satisfied with tranquility.

They must have action, and they will make it if they cannot find it."

"Women feel just as men feel.

They need exercise for their faculties and a field for their efforts as much as their brothers do.

They suffer from too rigid a restraint, too absolute a stagnation, precisely as men would suffer."

It's very emotional being up here.

It's like I'm looking at the ghosts of my past.

I can see 4-year-old me and 7-year-old me and, like, 18-year-old me.

It's all here.

My entire life has played out on these moors.

It's my land, you know?

I feel connected to this earth.

I feel like the world is full of possibilities.

[ New Model Army's "Poison Street" plays ] -♪ We were singing in the rain ♪ ♪ Like we invented singing ♪ ♪ It's alive in the sky ♪ ♪ From a million streetlights ♪ ♪ And we danced on the steps ♪ ♪ From all those old-time movies ♪ [ Birds chirping ] -I'm on my way to Ponden Hall to talk all things Heathcliff.

One of my favorite books of all time is "Wuthering Heights."

I was drawn into it in an almost mystical way, the landscape, the moors so familiar to me, and, of course, Heathcliff.

I read Heathcliff as not being white.

For me, he could have been Indian, he could have been mixed race, but screen adaptations made me believe otherwise.

-Cathy!

[ Static hisses ] -Cathy!

[ Static hisses ] -Cathy!

-When I read "Wuthering Heights" as a young girl, I saw Heathcliff as a man of color.

[ Static hisses ] Was he?

-Well, that is somewhat open to interpretation, but the text in many ways indicates yes.

-Isn't it interesting, then, all the interpretations, certainly the film ones?

-He doesn't look the way that he does in those adaptations.

-In the books.

The novel's been whitewashed.

-Did you also find him kind of compelling?

Was he sexy?

Was he exciting?

-Yeah, he's hot.

-[ Laughs ] -Heathcliff was the dark, broody anti-hero, and I -- and I guess I did.

Was I supposed to?

-The idea of an attractive man of color comes up in multiple novels across the 19th century in which white women are desiring of these men.

-Mm.

-We get long passages lingering on sexy Heathcliff, and we get to really kind of sit with that feeling, with this racialized man, of him inspiring women to just go a little bit crazy over what he had to offer.

-What is Emily trying to say?

-In a certain sense, we could read this as incredibly sad and potentially even quite racist, right?

There's something racially other about him.

He's incredibly abusive.

He is volatile.

On the other hand, he becomes this kind of "Byronic hero."

He's incredibly charismatic.

And because we follow his origin stories from the very beginning, we kind of know why Heathcliff is so angry.

He's been hideously abused by a family that only kind of sort of accepts him.

-Yeah.

So, I wonder what the connection is then, what the Bronte's exposure to people of color might have been.

-So, we have some evidence that some planters placed their children in boarding schools in Yorkshire.

Many of the local families whom the Brontes would have known growing up also had their proceeds from slavery, may or may not have been families that had mixed-race children.

There's actually quite a lot of research about mixed-race children who were born in the colonies being brought over to the mother country, and potentially having kinship ties with real English families.

So much of the drama of the early part of the novel... -Yeah.

-...is about whether or not Heathcliff fits into that family in a very similar kind of way.

Black and brown people were never missing from the landscape.

When we check literary history, when we actually identify trends in all of these old books, they're everywhere.

[ Laughs ] -Of course.

Because Britain was everywhere.

And this place that was bringing goods from all over the world and getting very, very rich on it.

Of course people are being brought along with that, as well.

-I think they're far more aware of these politics than can be immediately obvious to us reading now.

-Were they shaking up the system?

-They don't give us a straightforward narrative in which they tell wonderful, affirming stories about people of color and rehabilitate and resuscitate their images or push back in these incredible ways.

At the very least, they were deeply, intellectually curious about race, about slavery, about Black and brown people and their lives.

And maybe they just didn't have the context to be able to tell that story with much nuance.

But I still find it fascinating that they wanted it there.

-Yeah.

Emily and Anne spent a lot of time here at Ponden Hall, borrowing books from the well-stocked library and drawing inspiration from the house.

But I'm told there's one view I must see before leaving.

-"Wuthering Heights" is remembered for being this Gothic novel with this great ghost scene at the beginning.

And if you'll remember, Cathy's ghost comes and taps at the window.

Most likely, this window... -[ Gasps ] -...is the window that inspires that moment.

-And obviously Kate Bush is in my head on repeat right now.

I'm gonna touch this wall because I reckon the Brontes have touched this very window.

-Can you feel some Bronte energy coming off of it?

-Absolutely!

If there was an iconic window in literary history, that's it.

And not just literary history.

I mean, how many times have I danced to "Wuthering Heights" by Kate Bush?

I mean, you know, which woman hasn't?

Having seen that window and confirmed a lifelong belief that Heathcliff was probably brown, I now want to know more about Anne's novel, "The Tenant of Wildfell Hall."

How was her portrayal of domestic violence received in Victorian society?

And does a book from 1849 still have relevance today?

-"Tenant of Wildfell Hall" concerns a mysterious widow who has taken up the tenancy of Wildfell Hall and is the focus of gossip by her neighbors, and, indeed, the romantic interest of Gilbert Markham, who narrates the novel.

As the novel progresses, we realize that she is a -- she's escaped an abusive marriage.

Her husband was an alcoholic, he was violent, and he was engaged in abusive behavior towards their son.

-How was it received at the time?

-"The Tenant of Wildfell Hall" was very outspoken about certain issues, including Helen's refusal to sleep with her husband after marital estrangement had set in, and that was considered to be very controversial, as was her running away from him and taking her son with her.

While the critics were condemning the novel for being coarse and vulgar, it was selling hand over fist, so much so that the publisher had to bring out a second edition within six weeks.

-So, what does that tell us?

-It tells us that it was a best-seller.

It tells us that the story really struck a chord with its Victorian readership and that, while the literary reviewers, were saying one thing about it, the readers were saying something rather different.

-And had anything like this been written at all prior to that?

-Not really.

I think "The Tenant of Wildfell Hall" was quite a radical novel.

-Why do you think Anne wrote the story?

-I think she wrote it for lots of reasons.

I think she had personal experience of the difficulties of living with a violent, alcoholic man, sadly, from living with her brother Branwell.

She'd had to deal with Branwell's temper tantrums, his alcoholism, his drug addiction, his financial irregularities, and the extent to which most of the Bronte family funds went to support Branwell.

-And what did she do about those reviews?

-She wrote a biting preface to the second edition refuting them and saying, "Look, I did not write this book merely to amuse a readership, but to warn young women not to be seduced by romance, not to be seduced by a handsome, charismatic man, but to think carefully before taking the dreadful plunge into marriage on a casual acquaintance."

-Feminist hero.

-Mm, she is indeed.

-The more I learn about Anne, the more I'm thinking that she was probably the most disruptive out of the three.

-Mm, I think she was quite disruptive.

I mean, she was clearly a gentle soul, but I think her writing is powerful and disruptive.

-She's talking about issues that we are discussing to this day, except we have labels for them now.

-Yes.

-You know, domestic abuse, coercive control, gaslighting.

And you are actually using the text, aren't you, to help them?

-Yes, we are working with the domestic violence charity in Bradford.

-How do they respond to this text?

-Well, I think they're astonished to find experiences not dissimilar from their own.

In the Brontes' writing, it explores coercive control as a crime of the imagination, a crime of narrative, and a crime of, you know, sort of controlling somebody's mind.

So they're very interested when they read these texts to see how that is articulated and reflected in a novel from 1849.

-And is it empowering?

-It is empowering, yes.

I think it is empowering.

-There must be a sense of connection and empowerment in that slamming of the door... -Yes.

Helen leaves her husband.

She makes a plan, and she gets out.

And I think that that's very, very inspiring and rewarding.

If a woman could do it in 1849, it generates possibilities and hope.

-I'm thinking what Anne might think of that 200 years later.

-I think she would be -- I think it's fulfilling, what she promised in her preface, when she said that she was writing not simply to amuse, but for a serious purpose -- to educate.

-I'm totally in love with the three sisters, especially Anne.

You know, this book is just incredible.

What she was trying to say, what she was doing for women, it just resonates quite deeply with me.

If she'd had Instagram or Twitter, I can guarantee the amount of women that would have got in touch with her to say, "I read your novel."

-They would indeed.

They would indeed.

♪♪ ♪♪ -Courting controversy with portrayals of domestic abuse, coercive control, and women daring to want equality, I'm eager to find out how the sisters took on their critics.

Have our perceptions of the novels changed over the years?

♪♪ -"There seemed to have arisen in the novel-reading world some doubts as to who really wrote this book.

Whoever it be, it is a person who, with great mental powers, combines a total ignorance of the habits of society, a great coarseness of taste, and a heathenish doctrine of religion."

-Hello, Amber.

-Ah.

Hi.

-I was wondering if it might be you.

[ Laughs ] -"Jane Eyre."

-I hear it's very good.

-It's cracking.

[ Both laugh ] [ Whistle blows ] [ Steam whistle blows ] [ Train chugging ] -1848.

What was happening in the Bronte sisters' lives?

-Well, they might have been on a train like this.

We have Charlotte and Anne going by train to London from Keighley because they're on a mission to prove who they are to their publishers, Anne's publisher has been telling the world that he owns the rights and has access to all these mysterious Bell brothers who are publishing these strange books.

But he doesn't.

And George Smith, Charlotte's publisher, is not happy, so she's going down there to prove that she is separate and distinct from Acton and that she is his writer.

-It's amazing to think that even the publishers didn't know who was writing these books.

-Exactly.

Well, Charlotte's an incredible letter writer, and when she's writing letters of business to her publisher, George Smith, she writes as Currer Bell.

She writes playing the game of being a literary man of letters.

She writes in that assured voice.

So she was very good at pulling the wool over their eyes.

-And so what happened when they walked into the room?

-Well, to be a fly on the wall... -Exactly.

Yeah.

-...on that day.

I imagine people were very surprised by these two women from the north of England turning up with this little letter just to prove who they were.

♪♪ -What are the reactions to their novels?

-"Jane Eyre" comes out first.

People love it.

The critics to begin with are pretty kind.

This is a powerful new voice.

It's an exciting new voice.

And then, ever so slowly, little kind of doubting voices creep in, like, "Is this a moral book?

Is this quite proper, this book?"

And eventually, an absolutely savage review gets published in 1848 by a woman called Elizabeth Rigby, who tears the book apart, accuses the writer, Currer Bell, of being "coarse," and if this Currer Bell should happen to be a woman, it's a woman who's "long forfeited the company of her own sex."

-Ooh!

-And those are her words.

-And if she suspects she's a woman, maybe she really went all guns blazing.

-It's a double bluff.

She says, "Currer Bell can't be a woman because a real woman wouldn't write anything like this."

But, really, the attack is because she is a woman.

-So she'd figured it out.

So what exactly did Elizabeth Rigby say?

-She was extraordinarily rude.

♪♪ Jane Eyre is "the worst sin of our fallen nature."

And the spirit that wrote the book was the same spirit fostering Chartism at home and revolution in Europe.

-So what's Charlotte Bronte's response?

-At the time when she reads that review, she's actually working on her second novel, "Shirley."

So what she decides to do is to get her own back in a preface to "Shirley."

And the point of the preface is just to laugh, laugh at this -- this critic who could possibly have been scandalized.

But in order to do that, there's a very rude joke in there.

-What kind of joke?

-It's a knob gag, Anita.

-A knob... [ Both laugh ] -Poor kid.

[ Both laugh ] [ Train whistle blows ] -So this preface takes the form of a letter to Elizabeth Rigby, and in it, Currer Bell becomes this hilarious bachelor figure and he likes to flirt with women.

And Currer's got a gouty leg.

And there's this whole passage where Currer's laughing at this "invalid member" that he's got, and that, "Why would you be so shocked and scandalous at someone quite so, um, impotent?"

So she makes a knob gag.

-Amazing.

-This is not the kind of image that we traditionally have of Charlotte Bronte.

-And quite punk, I'd say.

It's like, "Alright, you thought that was shocking.

I'll shock you even more."

-"I'll give you shocking."

-Yeah.

-Yeah, yeah, yeah.

-Good on her.

-Absolutely.

-So that's fighting talk really, isn't it?

-It's fighting talk, but it's fighting talk that she didn't get to say out loud because her publishers, the men who are running the business, wouldn't print it.

-Until when?

When was it printed?

-Finally gets made public in the 1970s.

-Shush!

-Long after everyone's dead.

-What's slightly blown my mind here, Amber, is that we're getting all this information from the preface, and I have to say, I am a preface skipper.

-Well, shame on you.

-Yes.

Thank you.

Do shame me.

-Never skip a preface -- That's what I tell my students.

The preface becomes a space where they can, you know, have a right of reply and counter some of these accusations.

[ Birds chirping ] ♪♪ -Emily Bronte dies in 1848, aged just 30 -- a year after her only novel, "Wuthering Heights," is published.

Within five months, Anne is also dead, aged 29 -- her legacy, "Agnes Grey" and "The Tenant of Wildfell Hall."

So Charlotte outlives Anne and Emily.

-She's so deep in grief, she can't write at that point.

So what she actually does is, she brings out a new edition of "Wuthering Heights" and "Agnes Grey," and she writes some new prefaces to tell the story of her sisters' lives from her perspective.

And then in 1850, she outs them.

She -- She gives away their first names.

But Charlotte never gives up her own name.

She remains Currer Bell.

-Why do you think she feels the need to tell the world about her sisters?

-The critics haven't been kind to "Wuthering Heights," and they'd been shocked by "Tenant."

So she's presenting a version they could accept.

Emily is this strange poet, this "nursling of the moors."

Anne is this dutiful Christian who -- who wrote works that pained her, but which she felt it was her duty to produce.

-So she's the press officer, really.

Or the spin doctor, if you like.

-Absolutely.

She's PR.

-Yeah.

Doing a good job, as well.

-Very good.

-How has our view changed about them?

-I think the legacy of the Brontes has been sort of narrowed.

They've been made safe.

They're now Penguin Classics and they've been adapted into these great films, but... -Love stories.

-Always a love story.

But that's -- that's not really the books.

And one of the things that surprises my students the most when they reread these books now as sort of 18- to 21-year-olds living in a post-MeToo era is, they see the violence, they see the toxicity, and they see the abuse in a way that we perhaps don't see when we first read them.

-So young women studying them now are not falling in love with Heathcliff?

-Oh, no.

♪♪ ♪♪ -It takes guts to do what they did.

They were saying outrageous things for the time.

These are still taboo subjects that people don't like to hear about.

Still, women around the world are being oppressed for saying the same things that they were saying 200 years ago.

The three sisters wrote different books saying different things, but all of them have a huge amount of meaning for me.

Charlotte writing about liberation and empowerment and independence for women, you've got Anne writing a book commenting on domestic violence and really ruffling feathers, and then Emily writing this Gothic supernatural novel about dark, very complicated romance -- all of these things totally relevant today.

And women in the 21st century are still looking to their works and still reading their words and feeling a sense of empowerment.

And here I am, 200 years later, fighting the same fight in my own way.

And so I completely get why the moors inspired them.

♪♪ This is a place where I feel completely free.

It's like, you can express yourself and not be judged.

And in every other aspect of my life, I've felt judged or had the weight of expectation on my shoulders.

And you know what I thought about all of that?

Pbht!

[ Laughs ] To use the late, great Rik Mayall... pbht!

[ Laughs ] "I remember that the real world was wide, and that a varied field of hopes and fears, of sensations and excitements awaited those who had the courage to go forth into its expanse, to seek real knowledge of life amidst its perils."

[ Wind gusting ] [ Birds calling ] ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪