In the library of the Brontë Parsonage at Haworth is a drawer of objects never shown to the public, unless a curious scholar requests a personal viewing. Shrouded away from the common eye, which may rove at will over gauzy bonnets, Charlotte's headless dummy modelling a dress, or one and a half mouldered pattens belonging to Aunt Branwell, are seven pairs of stockings, plus an odd one, belonging to the Brontë sisters. The odd one is Emily's.

One views the contents of this drawer with a mortified shiver of trespass, relieved to see it slide shut on its 150-year-old trove of used and useless hosiery. It is not just the fact that the stockings are plumped up with tissue paper, making the drawer seem inhabited by tiny legs, which so disquiets; but that these intimate garments bear stains and darns which their owners left in them. The preserved stockings (and apparently there is a corset of Charlotte's too, of minute dimensions) throw us back on questions of the wholesomeness of our curiosity; and upon the utter deadness of the Brontës. Nothing haunting here; nothing romantically secret in these yellowing revelations: but an exposure to a privacy, a reprimand to its violator. We are reminded of the reward of nosing too far into other people's dead business: carrion curiosity, pecking at the dead, denying their right to the permanent privacy of oblivion, scents its own corruption. As I turned away, the library took on, for a few minutes, a mortuary air. But when I opened a book, the living spoke to me.

How far should we delve into the life of artists? This is a pertinent question in an age when biography sells, and Brontë- mania is an industry. But didn't Charlotte, Emily, and Anne bring it all on themselves by writing so brilliantly of curiosity and the desire to explore a private world? Hiding behind their Bell pseudonyms, they wrote their hearts out behind a screen, their seclusion generating the Bell-mania that hit London, with Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, and Agnes Grey in 1847. Who were they? How many – three, or one with three pen-names?