Deborah Lutz | The Brontë Cabinet: Three Lives in Nine Objects | W.W. Norton | May 2015 | 42 minutes (6,865 words)

Below is an excerpt from the book The Brontë Cabinet, by Deborah Lutz, as recommended by Longreads contributing editor A. N. Devers.

* * *

Long neglect has worn away

Half the sweet enchanting smile

Time has turned the bloom to grey

Mould and damp the face defile

But that lock of silky hair

Still beneath the picture twined

Tells what once those features were

Paints their image on the mind.

—Emily Brontë, Untitled Poem

If the Brontës’ things feel haunted in some way, like Emily’s desk and its contents, then the amethyst bracelet made from the entwined hair of Emily and Anne is positively ghost-ridden. Over time the colors have faded, the strands grown stiff and brittle. Charlotte may have asked Emily and Anne for the locks as a gesture of sisterly affection. Or, the tresses were cut from one or both of their corpses, an ordinary step in preparing the dead for burial in an era when mourning jewelry with hair became part of the grieving process. Charlotte must have either mailed the hair to a jeweler or “hairworker” (a title for makers of hair jewelry) or brought it to her in person. Then she probably wore it, carrying on her body a physical link to her sisters, continuing to touch them wherever they were.