An unknowing visitor to National Portrait Gallery, so abundantly stocked with canvases showing the great and the good, could easily wander by without taking much notice of the only surviving group portrait of three famous sisters, Anne, Emily and Charlotte Brontë.
Television presenter Anita Rani, born and raised in Bradford near to the former Brontë home in Haworth, is very familiar with the image painted by their troubled brother Branwell.
“We had the iconic painting of the Brontë siblings on the wall in school and they've loomed over me my whole life,” she says, talking to The Yorkshire Post.
“Wuthering Heights was just one of those books - I can't even remember when I first read it - but I remember reading it under my duvet with my torch, but really connecting to the story and its supernatural nature. It's sort of bleak, Gothic nature.
I guess that when you grow up in Yorkshire, in West Yorkshire, you understand that. It's in you. I’ve just done lots of interviews with people trying to explain what that means, but if anybody's walked up on the moors as a kid, you can't explain it. There's a real freedom in those moors, but there's also a broody, dark, mystical, bleakness about them - but there's romance in that. And that was me as a teenager. Reading Wuthering Heights, wearing Dr Martens, stomping across the moors, listening to the Smiths in my headphones, raging against everything that I was being told, trying to figure out why I was being told that I had to behave in a certain way, and I actually just wanted to go and live my own life.
“Then fast forward 35-odd years, here I am telling their story - and it turns out they were doing the same thing.”
She explores her heroines in a new documentary, The Brontës by Anita Rani: Sisters of Disruption, which airs on Sky Arts on Tuesday, May 20.
Anita delves into her own “obsession” with the famous siblings and also learns about what really motivated their writing, hearing about the circumstances in which they lived, discussing racial representation and discovering the ways in which their texts are still used to help women suffering today.
Anita meets experts and along the way visits the National Portrait Gallery in London, the Brontë Parsonage in Haworth, and walks on the moors nearby. She also takes a trip to her parents’ old business, drawing parallels between her own world and the sisters’ lives.
One clear picture she comes away with is that - despite the many adaptations of Emily’s Wuthering Heights which present it mainly as a romantic love story, for example - much of the sisters’ works are full of rage.
“Let's not romanticise them too much and let's not think of these sisters as being these twee women sitting around crocheting and knitting,” says Anita, 47, who lives in Hackney.
“They are serious, smart people who are worldly. Well, were they worldly-wise? I mean, they grew up in that place in Yorkshire but they were reading about what was happening in the world and they were reflecting on what was happening in the world - they were paying attention to what was happening. Even the title, Sisters of Disruption, which they were… it feels like the documentary itself is disrupting a narrative, which feels very good to have a punk spirit which I think they had as well.
“Let's remember that women raging and having to change the agenda and talk about equality is nothing new.”
Anita talks to Professor Katy Mullin, from the University of Leeds, who was lead researcher for Coercive Control: From Literature into Law, which the institution describes as the first interdisciplinary project to consider the complex relationship between British literary fiction and the crime of coercive control.
Prof Mullin tells Anita how Anne’s book The Tenant of Wildfell Hall - a “radical novel”, she says - is being used as an aid for domestic violence charity in Bradford.
Anita says: “That's so powerful, that a piece of literature that was written 180 years ago can still have so much meaning to it that it's used as a resource to help women who are going through similar things now in the modern era.”
It speaks to “the power of art and the power of that storytelling and the power of her conviction,” says the Woman’s Hour presenter, who released her memoir The Right Sort of Girl in 2021, which was followed up by her novel Baby Does A Runner in 2023.
Anne might have been the most quiet of the sisters, but no less angry. She’s also probably Anita’s favourite of the three.
She says: “The story that she tells was so taboo - to talk about a woman who leaves a marriage, leaves an abusive relationship, and empowers herself and takes her child with her. I think, for me, that is so badass. I can relate to the anger. I guess what I feel is, as a child I always felt that I wanted to do so much, and I could see everything happening around me and feel all the weight of expectation, but now I've got to a point where I don't actually care about any of it anymore.”
Meanwhile, there are debates about race, too. Actors who have portrayed Heathcliff on screen over have tended to be white but the possibility that the character was not - he is described in the book as "dark-skinned” or a "a little Lascar" (a South Asian sailor) - has been raised more in recent years.
Anita, whose parents were born in India, felt it was important to include that conversation because, growing up in Heaton and Odsal, she had “never read anything like that before” - a novel with a key character “who could look like me”.
She says: “It's on the page. It's art, and if Heathcliff wasn't that for you, that's fine, that's who you've got in your head. But it is also very possible that he wasn't white, and very probable. I think it's written there,” she says. “It's pretty straightforward. I don't think people should have an issue with it. I really don't. And if people do have an issue with it, maybe they should ask themselves why.”
The documentary also looks at how Haworth in the early to mid-1800s was a difficult place to stay live.
Dr Claire O’Callaghan, editor-in-chief of Brontë Studies, the official journal of the Brontë Society, explains to viewers how residents in Haworth, which then had no sewer or drainage system, would throw out their waste and materials from the slaughterhouses.
“The streets were literally running with blood and all kinds of horror that you can’t even imagine today,” she says in the documentary.
The smell from the graveyard, too, was atrocious as the village’s one cemetery could not accommodate the number of deaths which happened at the time.
Anita says: “We don't think about something as basic as health and hygiene and just the stench and the rot and the disease that was all around them. Misery. And literally the smell. And how that would have informed them. We think about the moors and the landscape actually, that just what they're seeing day in day out would have absolutely seeped into their psyche and, ultimately, was their own downfall.” (John Blow)
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