She listened to my uncle’s animated stories while he behaved as if he had known the Brontë sisters personally and had visited them on a daily basis. In his view, they were a couple of withered wretches, never experienced anything, all of it made up, the three of them at the top of the hill, sitting around a table fabricating stories, wasting away with tuberculosis, afraid of real life, afraid of love, afraid of ghosts and of God.
