Britain's incredible landscapes were the inspiration for some of our greatest female writers.

From Beatrix Potter's idyllic Lake District to the rugged Cornwall of Daphne Du Maurier and the rolling chalklands of Jane Austen's Hampshire.

I'm Mariella Frostrup and my passion is books.

Now I want to uncover the stories behind some truly classic novels to find out what made these great authors write the works they did.

From forgotten walks to mysterious coves, I'll be discovering the hidden secrets of these landscapes that so moved our best-loved female writers to create their masterpieces.

Oh, my goodness!

What have we got here?

There'll be big revelations as I find diaries, letters and new evidence that show what these regions really meant to these authors.

And why their stories couldn't have come from anywhere else.

It's a journey that will reveal why our greatest novels weren't just written by their authors, but by the times and places they lived in.

Today, I'm in Yorkshire discovering how its iconic moors inspired the Brontes to write novels like Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights.

There's no other book in English literature where you can say this landscape and this book are connected to that extent.

Why huge wealth from the textile industry here led to a boom in jobs for governesses and gave the Brontes great writing material.

An extraordinary extravaganza!

And how these three ground-breaking sisters confronted the harsh realities of Yorkshire life to push for real social change.

I'm getting this sense of, like, Hades.

It sounds like the underworld!

West Yorkshire.

A place where traditional farmland and vast rolling moors sit cheek by jowl with industrial towns that have shaped the history of Britain.

It was here in the first part of the 19th century that the world's most famous literary sisters were born, the Brontes.

In their short lives, Charlotte, Emily and Anne wrote some of the best-loved books ever, including Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights.

Together, these novels have sold millions of copies in over 60 languages.

But in their lifetimes, they were mostly unrecognised, publishing under pseudonyms that obscured their true identities and gender as they fought for success in a male-dominated world.

It's a struggle that defined one of my favourite literary characters, Jane Eyre.

"Women feel just as men feel.

"They need exercise for their faculties "and a field for their efforts, "and it is narrow-minded in their more privileged fellow creatures "to say that they ought to confine themselves "to making puddings, to playing on the piano "and embroidering bags."

What I love about the Brontes is that you really feel the beginnings of feminist literature.

All of their heroines are in one way or another pushing against conventional expectations.

I've come to Yorkshire to discover what role the people and places here really played in shaping the Bronte sisters' great works, and how this led to writing about subjects and themes that would still resonate with readers around the world nearly 200 years later.

Here in their home village of Haworth, you can be in no doubt just what a legacy these sisters left behind and how much they're still loved.

The Brontes' presence here in Haworth is still everywhere.

Wherever you look, you'll see examples of their literary genius.

Villette's coffee shop, Wuthering Arts, even the Wi-Fi in my guest house is "Bronte12"!

But it's not here in Haworth that I want to start my journey.

Over the fields behind the parsonage where their father worked as rector is the place that seems to have had the biggest effect on the sisters.

The moors would be a constant inspiration and refuge throughout their lives.

Emily, said to be the quietest of the sisters, particularly loved the dramatic landscape and the seclusion the moors offered.

She drew on the moors the most to create the only novel she ever wrote, Wuthering Heights - the tale of a doomed love affair between the farmer's daughter Catherine and the orphan Heathcliff.

"Wuthering Heights is the name of Mr Heathcliff's dwelling.

"Pure, bracing ventilation they must have up there at all times.

"Indeed, one may guess the power of "the north wind blowing over the edge "by the excessive slant of a few stunted firs "at the end of the house, and by a range "of gaunt thorns all stretching their limbs one way "as if craving alms of the sun."

Emily was particularly influenced by this harsh and desolate countryside.

Her characters have to battle these unforgiving elements to survive.

What I want to know first is why this part of Yorkshire looks this way.

Helping me find the answer is Professor Chris Jackson.

There's something about moorland because we think of it as this wild, desolate natural landscape.

But actually, it's wild and desolate because we made it that way, isn't it?

Exactly.

I mean, it does feel very remote and you can see how, looking out across the landscape, this would inspire you to think of wild thoughts.

But, actually, it has been strongly touched by human hand.

There's evidence of burning thousands of years ago from people who were actually using the land for agriculture.

Also, the fact there's very few trees here may suggest that trees can't grow here, but the trees that were here were logged and removed for industrial purposes.

So it's a strange feeling that you are somewhere wild, but you're actually somewhere that's kind of been touched quite strongly by humankind.

Without these man-made changes, this place would look very different and we might never have had Wuthering Heights at all.

In a way it's the epitome of what we fear most.

You know, desolate moorland, empty, but at the same time clearly, you know, people just love it.

There's something we get from it as well.

Yes, presumably goes beyond simply the physicality of being out in the moors.

I mean, there's a mental trigger from being up in here.

It makes you think different thoughts when you're in a different environment.Yeah.

And it probably affects us all differently.

Some people think of this as being desolate and haunting, but other people see it as being really positive and stimulating.

I think I'm a bit of both.

HE LAUGHS But I could do without the drizzle!

Yeah.

Exactly!

But it may not have been just the desolate look of this landscape that made Emily see it as a wild and unforgiving place.

Author Dr Michael Stewart believes that Emily's depiction of the moors could have been influenced by a natural disaster she witnessed here as a young girl.

In 1824, when Emily was six years old, just over there, there's a bog called Stanbury Bog.

The girls were out playing just below the bog, and it exploded.

They saw this seven-foot-high slurry of rock and peat wash down from the moors, down the valleys, into... Like lava?Like lava, yeah, into the River Aire.

But at the time, it made national press, it was a national news story.

And Emily being six, it would have been a very formative experience for her.

And she would have seen the land alive with this terrible destructive beauty.

Emily used her feelings about this place to create two of literature's best-known characters, Heathcliff and Catherine.

And coming here and seeing this place for myself, I can really see how they were born out of this landscape.

There's a wonderful passage where Catherine is relating a dream she has, where her and Heathcliff are expelled from heaven, and they're thrown, cast out on the moors.

So the moors are a kind of alternative to heaven.

A kind of pagan heaven.

A heaven without a god.

I think in a way the characters kind of personify the moors.

I mean, the name Heathcliff is directly related to the landscape, isn't it?

When it comes to Wuthering Heights, how much do you think that that book has shaped our idea of these moors?Oh, completely.

There's no other book in English literature where you can say this landscape and this book are connected to that extent.

I can't think of another novel in English literature where you can say this is the book.

Emily's novel, Wuthering Heights, would become one of the best-loved and most popular novels of all time.

But what I find particularly fascinating about the Brontes is how all three sisters - Charlotte, Anne and Emily - became successful authors with their own very different styles and subject matter.

I'm heading to the parsonage in Haworth, where the sisters spent most of their lives, to find out why they all turned to writing.

It's now a museum dedicated to the Bronte family, and I'm hoping curator Anne Dinsdale can shed some light on how the shared passion of the sisters developed.

Wow, this place is amazing!

It's like a time capsule, isn't it?

How authentic is it?

I mean, how much is it like it would have been when the Brontes lived here?

Virtually everything you see in the house belonged to the family.

And it was a large family.

Charlotte, Emily and Anne didn't just have a brother, Branwell.

They also had two sisters, who died as children.

After the death of their mother, their father, Patrick, kept his surviving children close, regularly teaching them the classics at home.

So this was quite an enclosed, almost claustrophobic existence in a way?

Yeah, I think so, but they had each other.

They were all very close in age, and they invented extraordinary games and imaginary worlds.

So, although their life here ran like clockwork, outside the routines and the lessons, there was all this creativity going on.

That creative urge soon had the Bronte sisters writing together, and the first example of their work is an extraordinary one.

Oh, I've got to take a look at that.

It's a tiny magazine, handwritten for their brother Branwell's toy soldiers.

"Second series of the young men's magazine.

"November 4th, 1830."

The print is ridiculously small!

I mean, I'm looking at it through a magnifying glass, and I can barely see it.

Was that so that other people couldn't read them?

Or what was the point of that?

Well, I think initially, it was to be in scale for the soldiers, but it soon became a sort of shared secret code amongst the siblings.

What was happening in these worlds that they were describing?

There were illicit love affairs, illegitimate children, so not always what you would have expected from the minister's children.

I can really see already why life here ensured that all three sisters became writers.

They spurred each other on from a very early age, a habit that would bind them for life.

This is the table that the three girls would sit around and write, is it not?

That's right.

And every evening, they would walk around the table discussing their writing and reading aloud from their work.

It's quite unusual, isn't it?

Because, you know, authors tend to be solitary creatures, you know, sitting alone in their studies, and they had sort of their own self-created writer's bubble, didn't they?

Like a writer's retreat.

Yeah, absolutely.

They all sparked off each other.

It was clear from childhood that all three sisters wanted to pursue a literary career, but their inspirations would come from very different aspects of their lives here in Yorkshire.

I've seen how Emily was fascinated by the moors, but now I'm going to look at how her sister Charlotte was more motivated by the social issues and injustices she encountered in the rural Yorkshire of her time.

In her greatest novel, Jane Eyre, Charlotte would invent a character who would challenge and shock Victorian society, a heroine who would fight for equality and dignity.

But what was going on here in Yorkshire that provoked Charlotte to create her?

That's what I'm about to find out.

I'm in West Yorkshire, finding out how this region inspired the world-famous Bronte sisters to create their iconic novels.

I've discovered why the wild and desolate moors had a particularly profound effect on Emily and enabled her to conjure up the legendary Wuthering Heights.

But now I want to look at the reality of life in a Yorkshire village like Haworth.

How did the challenges of growing up here influence the kinds of work sisters Charlotte and Anne wrote?

I'm going to start with one of the novels I love most.

This county, with its brooding landscapes and industrial towns, helped Charlotte Bronte create one of literature's most famous and best-loved characters.

Jane Eyre grew up in this environment and is very much a part of this place.

Charlotte Bronte spent almost her entire life living here in the parsonage in Haworth.

But what role did that really play in bringing Jane Eyre to the world?

the story of an orphan who becomes a governess to survive, and eventually finds love and happiness with her employer.

Today, Haworth is a tourist mecca full of tearooms and souvenir shops.

But when Charlotte wrote Jane Eyre, almost 200 years ago, this was a place of extreme poverty where people struggled to survive.

Life was particularly tough for children here.

Incredibly, almost half of them would fail to reach their sixth birthday.

The first third of Jane Eyre is devoted to Jane's childhood, and it tells of the hard times she had at a school primarily for orphans.

It describes the death of her friend Helen Burns from TB.

"I learned that Miss Temple, on returning to her own room at dawn, "had found me laid in the little crib, "my face against Helen Burns' shoulder, "my arms around her neck.

I was asleep, and Helen was dead."

Before she was ten, Charlotte herself had lost two young sisters to tuberculosis.

But she would also have experienced child mortality wherever she went here.

I'm meeting local historian Johnnie Briggs to find out why, and what influence this would have had on Charlotte and her novel, Jane Eyre.

This is where all the cottages start.

Would these have been workers' cottages in their time?

Yes.

One of the things that's going on here is the overcrowding.

Every corner is jammed with people.

With that sort of overcrowding - you're talking eight people in a family in one room - what was drawing people here?

Because it doesn't sound that alluring!

HE CHUCKLES There's work.

With the growth of the local textile industry, more and more people poured into villages like Haworth with its mills and looms.

But this only served to make overcrowding worse.

Even today, I can still get a real feeling of just how bad that was.

This gives you a sense now, if we go down this ginnel, of what lies behind and how claustrophobic it is.

My goodness!

This really is a tight squeeze.

I mean, I'm small, and it's just very narrow.

You get such a sense of how packed in everything was.

You get this great sense of claustrophobia of everything closing in, where the tenements are all stashed together.

And you'll see that there are all cellar dwellings as you go down, so people living even below this level.

It's dark, it's unhealthy.

It's this real sense of oppression that you get from these little places.

No wonder there were dark satanic mills!

I mean, I'm getting this sense of, like, Hades, you know, it sounds like the underworld.

This influx of workers and overcrowding in Haworth meant big problems with sanitation.

This was a hot topic in the Bronte household as Charlotte and her sisters grew up.

CHURCH BELLS RING Their father, Patrick, became so concerned that he petitioned for a report to see what could be done.

Well, here's a question.

You wake up in the morning, Mariella, you've got a bucket of poo.

Where are you going to put it?

Chuck it out the window at the neighbours.No!

This is 1840, not 1640.

We don't have drains, we don't have sewers, so you've got to put it somewhere.

And they're sort of tidy, but they're not really.

They put it in a midden shed.

So the middens are full of human poo.

And you've got people slaughtering their own pigs.

And the offal and putrid waste are piled into that as well.

It must have stunk to high heaven!

It would have been abominable.

At least 80 sources of infection just within this tiny village.

I'm genuinely staggered by the level of filth and overcrowding that people were enduring here.

No wonder so many children were dying.

But why was illness so much more prevalent here in Haworth compared to other villages in the region?

Ironically, the answer lies in the church graveyard, right next door to the Brontes' parsonage.

This is a very crowded graveyard.

It's extraordinary, in terms of the numbers.

Some say, from the 1600s, there might be as many as 30,000 burials, all piled on top of each other.

30,000?!

This really is just the saddest place.

I mean, I don't think I've ever seen so many graves for children in one place.

It's very hard.

And the grave I'd like you to see is this one, the Townends'.

This is little Simeon, son of Simeon and Alice.

And little Simeon will die in 1802, and he's only one year old.

And then, 1803, his sister Susie will die.

She's only four.

And then in 1808, their sister Nancy will die.

She gets to be 20.

But it's the burial practices.

The idea that you lift the big stone, you dig a very deep grave.

In goes little Simeon.

Fill it up, put the stone back.

A year later, up it goes.

You dig it out.

In goes Suzie, in goes Nancy, in goes auntie, in goes uncle.

You can have ten, 12, 15 people all piled on top of each other.

What people didn't realise was that these big family graves and their close proximity to the village's water supply were making matters far worse.

The water supply runs through the graveyard, runs down here to the head well, so those infected waters are going inside the water supply.

This contaminated water was causing more children to die, and from their parsonage windows, Charlotte and her sisters would have seen their father conduct funeral after funeral.

This really brings home why child death features so powerfully in Jane Eyre.

But surviving childhood was just the first hurdle.

Here in Haworth, even as an adult, you needed to fight to survive like Jane Eyre does.

With little money to the family's name, Charlotte and her sisters soon faced the challenge of how to earn a living in 19th century Yorkshire.

So what Charlotte did was to embrace one of the few professions available to her.

She became a governess, and she wasn't the only one - Anne took on the job, too.

Both would turn their experiences into literature.

Jane Eyre is the Brontes' most famous governess.

But Anne also drew on her experience to write Agnes Grey, the story of an impoverished young woman who endures a miserable time as a governess before she finds love with the local curate.

Governessing was a boom profession at this time in Yorkshire.

Its factories were creating a wealthy new class of industrialists who wanted their children privately educated.

I've come to Cliffe Castle, a former mill owner's mansion in nearby Keithley.

I want to find out about the Bronte sisters' experience of governessing, and how it influenced the novels they wrote.

This just really is quite an extraordinary extravaganza, isn't it?

It is remarkable, yes.

I'm meeting expert Dr Katy Mullin.

Is this the sort of thing that would have been built?

And is this normal?

I mean, to me, it looks like an explosion of kind of nouveau riche attention-seeking.

Well, I think it's an illustration of the fortunes that could have been made by industrialists in West Yorkshire.

This kind of newly rich, newly prosperous, newly middle class were the kinds of families that the Brontes would be working for.

I can't believe you're describing this as middle class!

I mean, what on earth did upper class look like?

SHE LAUGHS For Anne and Charlotte, who were well educated but poor, working as a private governess to Yorkshire's nouveau riche was one of the only employment options.

But how did the reality of the job compare to the way it's depicted in their novels?

What would the experience then be for a young girl, as Anne and Charlotte were when they set off to become a governess?

It feels to me that it would have been quite a lonely one, isolating one.

I think it was very lonely and isolating.

She's neither a servant nor quite a lady.

She has the education and the manners of a lady but not the dress, and obviously not the wealth, so she is in between.

Charlotte was particularly aware of this feeling of a governess not quite fitting in to any section of society, and conveyed it in her first novel, Jane Eyre.

Jane haunts the margins of rooms.

So she's often seen sitting in window seats or sitting behind curtains, or positioning herself behind large pieces of furniture.

And, as a small woman, she's very well placed to do that, especially in a room like this.

You can imagine, there are lots of hiding places.

So a lot of this is about making themselves inconspicuous.

For smart and ambitious women like the Brontes, one of the most frustrating aspects of the role may have been that it was often less about educating children and more to do with satisfying the aspirations of the parents.

The governess's role is very much to add polish of lustre to the raw material of a rich man's daughter.

No wonder Charlotte Bronte found it so dull.

She found it dull, and she found it irksome.

And that feeling of being both impoverished and yet looking down on the vulgarity of the nouveau riche is something that we have again and again in the Brontes' fiction.

Neither Anne nor Charlotte enjoyed their time as governesses, but it did provide them with rich writing material.

Anne's Agnes Grey is a powerful expose of the oppressive, often abusive conditions under which many governesses worked in the 19th century.

Charlotte, on the other hand, depicts a much more rose-tinted version of the profession.

But she also creates a heroine who is not afraid to challenge injustice.

Although that shocked some critics, it delighted many more readers.

Nowhere is this better summed up than in one of my favourite lines that Jane delivers to her employer, Mr Rochester.

"I'm not talking to you now "through the medium of custom, conventionalities, "nor even of mortal flesh.

"It is my spirit that addresses your spirit.

"Just as if both had passed through the grave "and we stood at God's feet, equal - as we are."

The job of governess may have been gruelling, but for the Bronte sisters, it paid off.

In 1847, Jane Eyre and Agnes Grey both hit the shelves and Victorian readers were gripped.

But the role of women and the options open to them was just one of the big social themes that the sisters would write about.

I'm about to find out why the Brontes lived with a gun in their house, and how this would inspire Charlotte's next tale of violence and destruction.

I'm in Yorkshire, finding out how the dramatic landscape here inspired the Bronte sisters, Charlotte, Emily and Anne, to write some of the best-loved novels of all time, like Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre.

The moors, with their stark beauty, unchanged for hundreds of years, were a magnetic force in the lives of the Bronte sisters.

This was the place they escaped to.

It was somewhere they could come for walks and picnics, talk about their problems, and dream up their plots and characters.

But back in the village of Haworth was a very different story.

There, the Industrial Revolution had well and truly arrived and it was to be the subject of Charlotte Bronte's novel, Shirley.

Charlotte wrote this book shortly after Jane Eyre.

It was inspired by the real-life hardships caused here when skilled textile workers were being replaced by machines.

The change meant many people lost their jobs and turned to violent protest.

In the novel, Charlotte picks up on these political and economic themes in a tale that deals partly with a mill owner who tries to reduce his workforce after installing new machinery.

But why was Yorkshire at the heart of all these changes?

I'm meeting up again with geologist Professor Chris Jackson, who thinks the answer lies beneath our feet.

Wow, getting a bit boggy round here, aren't we?

Chris, tell me first of all what it is about the geology of this particular area that made it such a perfect place for the Industrial Revolution to really kind of blast out.

So the geology here is central to that story.

We're standing here on rocks which are about 320 million years old.

But critically, those rocks contained coal.

And coal was really central to the powering of steam engines, which powered the Industrial Revolution.

And also coal was used for coking coal to make iron in smelting.

So the geology was absolutely foundational to the Industrial Revolution.

But the land here didn't just have coal to offer, it had another resource that would help the Yorkshire textile industry flourish in the Industrial Revolution.

The water here is what we call very soft water.

So down in the Yorkshire Dales, where that water is passed through limestone, it's very hard.

It's picked up lots of calcium and magnesium.

Here, the water went through these rocks which lacked that and it remains soft, which meant that when we add detergents for cleaning wool, we can create a very good and strong lather to clean that wool.

With coal for power and the right water, the Yorkshire textile industry attracted huge investment.

Traditional hand loom weaving was increasingly being replaced by machines in the mills, so skilled workers began to lose their jobs.

To understand the real impact that had here and why Charlotte chose this theme, I'm heading to the Calderdale Industrial Museum.

Museum Director Bernard Wadsworth is going to show me the difference between the traditional hand loom and the steam powered ones that replaced them.

We're going to start with this 200-year-old hand loom.

Maybe the best way for me to find out is to have a go.

Yes, certainly.

Shall I give it a try?

It's quite a substantial machine.

OK, you said - that sounded like a word of warning there, the substantial machine.

Apparently, it operates on pretty much the same principles as the toy weaving set of my childhood, so I feel confident enough to have a crack at it.

So, there's pedals down here?

Yes.

I need to get my foot on two of them?Two on the right.

OK.

OK.

Ready?

Now go for it.

Give it a good... The aim is to whip this shuttle from side to side as fast as possible.

The more times it pulls a thread across per minute, the more cloth I'll make to sell.

I suppose a person who was skilled at this, it would just fly across and back, would it?Yes, yes.

They'd be rattling it without a stop.

There were scores of skilled weavers using hand looms like this in their homes throughout Haworth.

Not quite as far this time.

No, that was terrible.

This thriving cottage industry provided extra work that was a vital lifeline for many people here.

But the end was in sight for this kind of hand weaving, as more and more mill owners realised how much more money they could make if they invested in mechanisation.

But just how powerful were these mechanised looms?

And what impact would it have on the communities?

Productivity was measured by the number of times the shuttle could pass from side to side, called "picks" per minute.

The new steam-powered large mechanised looms were in a whole new league, and productivity soared.

Larger amounts of cloth could be produced far quicker.

I mean, how much faster was it?

How much more could it do?

Well, you know how many picks you managed to put in upstairs.

Not many!

Well, this machine will do 60 picks a minute, which is 60 times... Backwards and forwards?Yeah.

Oh, my goodness!

So that really is an incredible step forward in terms of productivity.Yes.

Oh, that's not too bad.

Incredible!

You only need to see a few seconds of this machine in action to realise just how revolutionary it would have been.

In the same decade that Charlotte wrote Shirley, the number of power looms in the region went up tenfold.

Great news for the mill owners and investors, but disastrous for the many hand loom workers who lived here.

Yorkshire and its vital textile industry was changing beyond recognition.

The mill owners were making vast amounts of money at the expense of others, and this new burgeoning middle class was created in the Brontes' Yorkshire.

There were winners, but there were plenty more losers.

Those who lost their jobs had no safety net and life got pretty desperate.

In her novel Shirley, Charlotte Bronte depicts the very early years of industrial unrest when protesters, known as the Luddites, started wrecking weaving machines to try and save jobs.

Author Dr Michael Stewart thinks that Patrick Bronte's memories of a violent worker's revolt at Cartwright's Mill in 1812 may have inspired his daughter Charlotte to write her novel.

Depending on the historians you read, either 150 or up to 300 men gathered.

And they were wearing masks, they were wearing dark clothes, they had hatchets and muskets and pistols and Enoch hammers.

And they marched past Lowslythorn Farm, where Patrick Bronte was lodged, to the mill itself to attack it.

So they would have been fighting against the mechanisation process, wouldn't they?

They were really desperate, these men, and when they attacked Cartwright's Mill, they didn't realise that Cartwright knew about this.

He'd been tipped off, and he basically created a fortress from the mill.

He'd replaced the door with a very thick iron-studded door.

He'd made 16-inch spikes and put them on rollers and placed them on the stairs of the mill.

So if any of the Luddites tried to get upstairs to attack them, they would be impaled on these spikes.

If they managed by some miracle to overcome these spikes, at the top of the stairs were huge carboy jars of sulphuric acid, which he intended to pour over the heads of the men.

God, it's horrific!

So he wasn't messing about.

As a result of this attack in which two men died, Patrick Bronte kept a gun under his pillow.

Although a man of the church, he knew that he and his children would need to defend themselves if ever caught up in any of this.

He bought, around this time, a pair of Flintlock pistols, and he kept them throughout his life.

He fired them every day.

I think Emily did a bit of shooting as well, didn't she?

Well, Emily certainly was a good shot, according to Sam Greenwood, the guy who worked at the post office.

You can see why this story would appeal to her.

It had all the elements of a ripping yarn, really.

The violent showdowns between workers and mill owners in Shirley were no melodramatic invention.

They were based on what Charlotte had learned from her father and read of herself.

But I want to know where Charlotte's true sympathies lay.

Did she simply abhor the situation the workers found themselves in?

Or did she appreciate the need for progress and industrialisation?

Michael thinks he knows.

If you read Shirley, it's very clear that Charlotte's on the side of the mill owners rather than the working men.Really?

Yeah.Because there's also descriptions in Shirley of the misery of the working man.The leader of the West Riding Luddites in the novel Shirley is...describes as having "catlike, trustless eyes" and the Luddites are called vermin and hyenas.

Where we know... Well, that's pretty clear!Yeah!

The mill owner in Shirley is a noble character.

He's described as a lion, he's courageous and noble.

Where William Cartwright, we know, tortured two men to death.

So it was quite different, the real-life person to the fictionalised version.

Although we may think of the Brontes as great authors of sweeping romantic fiction, Charlotte was clearly fascinated by the huge political and social issues in her native Yorkshire.

While she described the suffering of the poor here, I think she also understood that progress often comes at a price.

But before she could finish Shirley, tragedy would strike.

I'm about to uncover how Charlotte dealt with heartbreak and what impact it would have on her writing.

I'm in Yorkshire, looking at how the incredible landscapes and events here inspired the Brontes to write their great novels.

In 1848, Charlotte was 32 and writing Shirley.

The sisters' debut novels - Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights and Agnes Grey - were capturing the attention of readers across the country.

But no-one yet knew the name Bronte.

All their works so far had been published under pseudonyms.

I've returned to the parsonage in Haworth, where curator Ann Dinsdale can reveal why.

So what have we got here, Ann?

This is the autographs of the three Bell authors.

It's the only occasion on which they all signed a single sheet of paper.

The Bell name was what the Bronte sisters wrote under.

Why did they choose to have a pseudonym?

They recognised that there was a double standard in the way books were reviewed at the time, and they wanted to avoid all that.

They wanted to be judged on the basis of their writing.

And they hoped that by choosing a fairly androgynous-sounding pseudonym, they'd escape that kind of gendered reviewing.

So they were androgynous rather than males pseudonyms?

Yes, they each kept their own initial.

So Charlotte was Currer Bell, Emily was Ellis Bell, and Anne was Acton Bell.

And their subject matter, which is surprising in this day and age, was considered to be quite, dare I say, racy?

Absolutely.

The books caused a really shocked reaction.

Everybody loved Jane Eyre when it first was published in 1847.

But then, three months later, Wuthering Heights appeared, and that was considered beyond the pale.

It is a shocking, quite a gut-wrenching book - a lot of violence and brutality in it - and people were quite repelled by it.

But just as all three sisters were finally achieving success, tragedy struck - not once, but twice.

Emily succumbed to tuberculosis and died, aged 30, shortly after Wuthering Heights was published.

Just months later, Anne also died of the same condition, aged just 29.

Both sisters were gone before their readers knew their true identities.

A devastated Charlotte came clean to the world, revealing who the Bells really were.

She defended her sisters' subject matter that had shocked society by blaming the upbringing that had shaped them.

She got round it by presenting the sisters as being quite naive, and coming from this fairly wild, godforsaken place where education had made little progress.

And really she was saying that they didn't actually understand what they'd written.But that's so sad because she clearly felt the need to apologise for what they'd written.

She worried about what people thought of her sisters.

She wasn't just being disingenuous, though, was she?

Because they were very much a product of this place, of the wildness of the moors, all of the forces that actually forged these writers.

Only Charlotte lived long enough to earn a good living as a famous author.

It's heart-breaking to picture her walking these moors alone, but I also imagine they provided comfort, as they once did for her most famous heroine.

When Jane Eyre discovers that Rochester is already married to a mad woman he keeps in the attic, she runs away.

She abandons her duties as a governess and the man she loves, and finds herself alone, up here on the moors.

Time and again, these moors are where the Brontes and their characters fled to escape the troubles of the world.

But nobody can hide from the world on the moors forever.

Eventually, Jane Eyre returns to Mr Rochester and marries him.

After the deaths of her sisters, Charlotte also considered marriage.

But was she expecting the same happy ever after as her heroine?

I'm meeting up with Dr Claire O'Callaghan, who thinks Charlotte would have had a very different mind-set.

In the 19th century, very rarely people married for love.

You usually married as a transaction.

And the reason for that is because, when a woman married, she was basically a legal property.

So she relinquishes her rights, she relinquishes her body, her children.

And if a marriage was unhappy, Charlotte would have been well aware what could happen to a Yorkshire wife amongst the poorest classes.

A practice so shocking that I find it hard to believe this was barely 200 years ago.

A practice known as a wife sale.

Possibly one of the most brutal things I never knew about British history.

We have quite a lot of records from the period giving us stories.

So we know that there were kind of sales happening in Halifax and in Ripon and in Selby.

The thing about wife selling is it often took place in a public place, like a pub, or in a marketplace.

So you would have a public auction, as we kind of see here, a wife who is property in law being brought out, as you would see cattle, livestock being sold.

Is this factual?

Like a dog collar?

Yep, a halter.

If your husband was kind, you might have ribbons rather than a halter.So kind!

So kind!Pretty, even.

I mean, what would you get for the average wife?

Sometimes it was a few pence, sometimes it was a few shillings.

We have one story of a woman who was sold for a pint, and her Newfoundland dog was thrown into the trade.

It wasn't really about money.

This would be a public way to acknowledge that, even though it wasn't legal, that one marriage had ended and another one began.

The passing of the halter would be the symbolic gesture of, "Now this person is your property.

"Now they belong to you".

I can imagine Charlotte being influenced by these news stories and tales of disastrous marriages amongst her father's parishioners.

She certainly didn't seem keen to head down the aisle herself, turning down several marriage proposals.

But in 1853, this changed when her father's curate, Arthur Bell Nicholls, proposed.

And Charlotte accepted.

I think she did that very much out of that loneliness that she now found herself in her life.

And it's one of the things that she then wrote into... I guess we might call it a prenup, a kind of marital arrangement, that she would marry Arthur Bell Nicholls but she wanted to stay in the parsonage and look after her father.

And there were provisions put in place for her wealth, and what would become of that.

And, by all accounts, those few months that they did have was really, really happy.

So it seems that even though she was reticent about marriage, negotiating it on her terms, she found love.

But then, tragically, just nine months after her marriage, Charlotte herself died, succumbing to pregnancy complications aged 38.

The Bronte sisters, the world's most famous literary family, were no more.

On Charlotte's death certificate, there's no acknowledgement of the great works she wrote, or indeed her real role in life.

It simply says, "Wife".

So her dream of a new way of life for women here in Yorkshire was something she would never experience herself.

Yet, in the books, the Bronte sisters did start the ball rolling for women who wanted to feel free.

Free to behave, to think, to feel the way they chose.

The Bronte sisters' short lives left behind an incredible legacy.

They didn't just survive the harshness of their environment, they used it to their advantage, turning it into works with an enduring appeal that they couldn't possibly have imagined.

It does seem remarkable that the unassuming Bronte sisters should achieve such lasting global success.

None of them would live past their thirties, but all of them would become iconic authors, revered and read still today.

And standing here, in the landscape that fired their imaginations and conjured their plots and their characters, it's easy to see how the Yorkshire that they grew up in could have inspired these tales of passion, violence and beauty.

Subtitles by Red Bee Media