What is it about the Brontës that encourages such curious speculations?

The Guardian's The Northerner Blog features artist Stella Vine.

Vine has now made her base in London but still takes regular trips back north. Earlier this year she created a portrait of Anne, Charlotte & Emily Brontë and generously gave of 100 prints of the work to be sold for £150 each in aid of the repair of the roof of the Brontës' local church in Haworth, St Michael's and All Angels, where Charlotte and Emily Brontë are buried, and where their father, the Rev Patrick Brontë, served as perpetual curate for over 40 years, if not perpetuity. (Alan Sykes)

And the Fifty Shades of Grey/Jane Eyre Laid Bare saga continues doing the round of newspapers, such as the Mirror today.

And in August, literature fans will be leaving the country as Jane Eyre Laid Bare is published.
Author Eve Sinclair describes it as “an erotic version of my favourite classic” and it’s set to be huge (“Reader, I mounted him”, presumably).

Oh No They Didn't! is tired of this new 'genre' already.

This post by Robert Armitage on the New York Public Library blog is a very good antidote:

Over the last few months, I have read all seven novels, many of the poems, and selected bits of juvenilia by the three Brontë sisters — as well as several biographies, odds and ends of literary criticism, and a fascinating volume about the Brontë legend, which over the years has sometimes overshadowed the facts of their lives.
Right now I feel as if I know them as well as I know my own friends and family. I suspect that I would enjoy hanging around the Brontës' dining room table of an evening, discussing books, talking over current events, and being catty about the Haworth neighbors. I would probably not be at the Black Bull Tavern, drinking gin with dissolute brother Branwell — since I know nothing good would come of that relationship. While I'd like to think that their clergyman father, Patrick, would enjoy my company (as long as the subject of religion did not come up), he would certainly not regard a poor librarian as a suitable match for any of his talented daughters.
What is it about the Brontës that encourages such curious speculations? (Read more)

Here's a pre-exhibition update from the Brontë Weather Project. Un blog de época writes in Spanish about Branwell Brontë. And, also in Spanish, Más allá del amor posts about Jane Eyre.