THERE’S a photo of me standing in a graveyard smiling, surrounded by foliage and memorial stones. Behind me is a grey house, with four of its windows in view, and a little wooden gate that separates the building from the graves. There’s nothing particularly notable or even eerie about the picture, except perhaps my smile. It’s just a young woman standing in an overgrown graveyard with a house behind her.

Except it’s not just that. For a lot of people – myself included – it’s quite a lot more. The house behind me is Haworth Parsonage, the Yorkshire home of the Brontë family more than 150 years ago.

Every year, thousands of tourists make the pilgrimage up the steep, cobbled main street of Haworth to the Brontë Parsonage and Museum. Some of these people are devoted fans of Anne, Charlotte or Emily – as well as Branwell (their brother), or Patrick (their father). Some simply want to tick this destination off their touristy to-do list. Whatever their passion, people are drawn to this place, which has become so culturally significant since the mid-19th century.

But exactly why do so many people clamber up that hill and take photos of a house and graves, and smile while doing so? It feels too simplistic just to say ‘the Brontës’ and move on.

Despite the fact that I’m doing a PhD on violence in the Brontës’ fiction at Durham University, I wasn’t always a fan of the Brontës as a whole. I was only really a Charlotte fan. As a teenager, like so many 15-year-olds, I had a bit of an obsession with Jane Eyre. Through university and into adulthood, it has remained with me as something of a constant. Until the age of about 20, I was firmly within the ‘Charlotte’ camp of the Brontë divide (in which Anne is so often, frustratingly, an afterthought).

I couldn’t understand how anyone could love the weird, chaotic world of Wuthering Heights, and understood even less how anyone could call it a ‘love story’. It was too disturbing, too violent. You wouldn’t catch me gushing over Heathcliff-the-hero or wishing I’d grown up on the Yorkshire moors.

Thankfully, I grew out of dismissing Emily and of pitting the three Brontë sisters against one another. Nowadays, it’s not only Charlotte’s writing that I return to, but the whole Brontë family’s – their books, poems, and letters. Yet I’m still often stumped when anyone asks me: ‘why the Brontës?’

I don’t have a neat answer, but I think it’s their paradoxes that I’m drawn to the most. As a family, they are an anomaly: there’s no one quite like them. But they’re also of their time: contrary to popular belief, they were not isolated loners; they lived in the midst of huge cultural and industrial change.

They are romance writers and also the authors of some of the cruellest passages in English literature. They are commonplace and extraordinary. They are never just one thing. That’s why our fascination with their fiction, and their lives, endures.

Now – almost 200 years to the day since Charlotte Brontë’s birth on April 21, 1816 – feels like the right time to reflect on everything she achieved and still represents. Of course, the Yorkshire moors and the ‘three weird sisters’ legacy that Ted Hughes coined in his 1979 poem, ‘Haworth Parsonage’, are still prominent in people’s imaginations. This image of the family has shaped, and continues to shape, the reception of Anne, Emily and Charlotte’s books; and, most dramatically, our view of their lives. But, recently, Brontë scholars have sought to unpick the fables that surround Charlotte and her sisters, and instead offer an account of their lives stripped of mythology.

My new book, Charlotte Brontë Revisited, aims to do something a little different, by reconsidering Charlotte from a modern-day perspective, in order to ask why she still matters and to see whether there are any parallels between how we live now and how she lived then. Her nature writing, for example, wouldn’t look out of place next to the likes of Robert Macfarlane or Helen Macdonald. And the proto-feminism that breaks out in her most well-known novel, Jane Eyre, still speaks to so many in the 21st Century.

But I think it’s her characters’ ability to rail against injustice that has the most lasting impression. As Jane Eyre so famously said: “I am no bird, and no net ensnares me; I am a free human being with an independent will”. For me, Charlotte Brontë’s legacy lives in these words.

n Charlotte Brontë Revisisted: A view from the twenty-first century by Sophie Franklin (Saraband, £9.99). ISBN: 9781910192382. W: saraband.net