If this is a real picture of the Brontës, then I'm Heathcliff!

A collector is convinced that the £15 photograph he snapped up on eBay is of the Brontë sisters. It’s highly unlikely, but the story is a mark of our enduring fascination with the literary family. Plus, a Brontë Society expert gives her verdict

Could this be the only photograph of the three Brontë sisters? asked Seamus Molloy, who picked the photograph up for 15 quid on eBay.

He should ask for his money back. It’s hardly worth making the obvious points. Technically, the photograph was clearly taken later than the tragically early deaths of the sisters.

Emily, after years of withering away, died of TB in 1848, Anne a year later. All, in this photograph, look as healthy as three Yorkshire puds. This photograph would have had to be taken in the 1840s, when photographic portraiture was in its infancy. This trio have left, the eye suggests, their infancy some way behind them. The one on the left (with a prayer book in her hand) looks middle-aged. Exposures, for the earliest photographs, took many minutes (trees were, for that reason, favourite objects: it can get boring).

It must be a late copy of an earlier photograph, ventures Molloy. Victorian CGI. The only evidence, other than the fact that there are three women (two of whom look neither like the one in the middle) is an indecipherable word on the back, which Mr Molloy deciphers as “Bells”: Bell was the pseudonymised, gender-neutral surname the sisters used for their first published books – after being told by the poet Southey (whom they sent manuscripts) to stick to cooking and darning. Could be ‘Belles’, of course.

Clinchingly, although what depictions we have of them are painfully scarce, the Brontë daughters didn’t look remotely like these three. Two days ago, in the biannual Gaskell Society conference (she was the biographer of Charlotte Brontë), Dr Karen Laird gave a brilliant talk, vindicating the equal importance of the “baby” sister, Anne.

The talk was embellished by the exquisite profile sketch Charlotte did of her little sister with neatly curled hair. Would Anne have allowed herself to be immortalised with the hairstyle of the middle woman in the Molloy photograph?

Charlotte also did a more dramatic picture of her wilder sister, Emily, stressing her aquiline profile. There was something very eagle-like about the woman. There is one surviving photograph of Charlotte in her thirties – again in profile –which has no resemblance at all to Molloy’s trio.

Readers of the Brontës have a natural craving to know what the authors looked like, as do Austenites. A rather dubious portrait of Jane turned up a few months ago. Nor is this the first dubious picture of the Brontes.

Portraits are one of the ways we get close to the authors we love. What little one can pick up from surviving material is that the Brontë sisters took huge sartorial pride in their appearance. Take the famous “pillar portrait”, done by Branwell, the doomed brother (original of both Heathcliff and the alcoholic Arthur in The Tenant of Wildfell Hall).

The set of the lips on Emily in the centre (she’s cunningly made herself tallest), tells one a lot about the author of Wuthering Heights – the woman capable of cauterising her own arm, with a red-hot poker, when bitten by a dog. Charlotte, on the right, has the sedate look of the older, mother-substitute sister. And Anne, on the left, seems to be saying (to herself), ‘why doesn’t anyone take any notice of me?’ Poor Anne.

Ponder the picture (Branwell, incidentally, is appearing, year by year more prominently ghost like, in the middle) and draw your own conclusions.

“Everybody wants to know what the Brontës looked like ...”

There’s a chance it could be genuine, but it’s unlikely. The Brontës were unknown when it would have had to have been taken. It would have been a very expensive process and quite unusual for the daughters of a poor country clergyman to have had their pictures taken. It wasn’t until a few decades later that ordinary people were having their pictures taken.

You’ve got to think, why would there be a picture of them? There’s certainly no record of them ever having had a photograph taken. Everybody wants to know what the Brontës looked like – I regularly get sent images, either portraits or photographs, of either one woman or three women, and people think that they’re the Brontës. We do what we can, but if the image has got no provenance and it’s not documented anywhere, it’s really difficult. Even if you can look at it and say, ‘well the hairstyles are absolutely right, the costume is right,’ it’s still difficult to know for sure.

Ann Dinsdale, Collections Manager, The Bronte Society

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