“Literature,” wrote the great poet, “cannot be the business of a woman’s life, and it ought not to be.”

Robert Southey, Britain’s poet laureate from 1813 to his death in 1843, was responding to a letter from a young correspondent seeking his advice on her early work. She wanted to know whether she might fashion a writer’s life for herself. It was 1837.

Southey continued, warming to his theme: “The more she is engaged in her proper duties, the less leisure she will have for it, even as an accomplishment and a recreation. To those duties you have not yet been called, and when you are you will be less eager for celebrity.”

His correspondent was discouraged, but not entirely. Ten years later she wrote Jane Eyre, one of the greatest works of English literature. There was a reason why Charlotte submitted her manuscript under the male pseudonym of Currer Bell. Her sisters Emily and Anne Brontë used the masculine monikers Ellis and Acton. Mary-Ann Evans wrote as George Eliot. (...)

I can’t speak for other women, but my version of the Roman Empire is the Brontë sisters - their wild, isolated weirdness, the startling, it-will-out nature of their talent, and the enormous burdens they faced as women writers – are ceaselessly fascinating to me. How did they do it?

I thought of the Brontës again recently, when I read a story about the gender bias in the authors and poets studied by final year students in NSW.

While authorities have increased the number of female authors, out of 105 authors, poets and film directors on the set text list, 61 per cent are men and 39 per cent are women.

The English head of an all-girls school told the Herald her teachers often chose writers like Margaret Atwood and Emily Dickinson to “counterbalance the many male voices in the curriculum”.

Thank god for the Brontës - their unlikely incubation in the Yorkshire Moors has considerably boosted the female ranks of the canon.

But despite being a Brontë stan, I find the idea of a gender quota for literary texts profoundly silly. (...)

Charlotte Bronte’s work does reflect female experience in a more explicit way. Jane Eyre is universal in its themes but much of its originality comes from the candid interiority of its plain heroine. No character like Jane had ever been considered worthy of literature before, and her close first person narration made the modernists possible. Crucially, Jane rages against the strictures of her femininity and depicts what we would now call toxic masculinity with clear-eyed precision.

Speaking of which: Brontë’s reply to Southey skated elegantly the line between propriety and sarcasm. “In the evenings, I confess I do think,” she wrote to him. “But I never trouble anyone else with my thoughts. I carefully avoid any appearance of preoccupation and eccentricity, which might lead those I live amongst to suspect the nature of my pursuits.”

Southey’s letter is now owned by the Brontë Parsonage Museum. His poems are not studied, and few outside academia remember his name.

Jude Rogers: What were your favourite books?

A.B.: I’d fill my suitcase for holidays with books and put a swimsuit on top. That was it – I’d read everything. I had my Roald Dahl and Jacqueline Wilson phases like everyone else, but I read Wuthering Heights, Sylvia Plath and Thomas Hardy very young. I was a sucker for a big, sad story, and still am.

On another occasion, Peachy Treats had a different kind of experience. She detailed: "I had a private session with a guy who wanted to read a section of a Jane Eyre book to me, while I sat with my boobs out. It was honestly very pleasant." (Christine Younan)

Books, on the other hand, became my best friend ever since I got familiarised with a long page of words and words. I attempted with the Diary of the Wimpy Kid series by Jeff Kinney to pure literature Jane Eyre by English author Charlotte Brontë. (Nghi Doan)

Elise Dumpleton: What was the first book you read that made you realize you wanted to be an author?

R.H.: Am I allowed to say Twilight? (Insert laughing-crying emoji here). The truth is that many of the classics I read growing up, which surprised me by being so twisty, and so suspenseful, were the original inspirations for me. Jane Eyre. Crime and Punishement, Wuthering Heights. These are the OG domestic suspense novels!

La naturaleza secreta de las cosas de este mundo está curiosamente ambientada en Manchester, y digo curiosamente porque en el “epílogo” confiesa que “nunca he estado allí”, algo que le permite “inventármelo todo, sin las distracciones que provocan el conocimiento y, eventualmente, el recuerdo”. No menos aparentemente curioso es que señale las numerosas frases de autores integradas en el epílogo, que titula más comedidamente El orden secreto de las cosas, con Virginia Woolf y Henry James como “los autores que más han influido en la escritura”, sin mencionar Cumbres borrascosas de Emliy Brontë, que ocupa un puesto destacado en el desarrollo de la novela. Hay dos relatos que son dos puntos de vista; uno de los personajes se llama Edgar, y Heathcliff desaparece y vuelve al cabo de tres años. (J.A. Masoliver Órdenas) (Translation)

Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë.

 J’ai longtemps hésité entre ce livre et le très différent Jane Eyre de Charlotte Brontë. Mais de toute façon, il fallait que ce soit l’un des deux. Ce que j’admire chez cette dernière, c’est l’ordre, le regard psychologique qu’elle a sur les personnages. Charlotte donne une forme même à l’obscurité. Et avec Emily, j’aime ce côté incohérent, émotionnel et irréfléchi.

Cela semble tellement cliché, mais je trouve les passions débridées des personnages, la nature sans fond et destructrice, écrites par une si jeune femme, particulièrement remarquables. Surtout comment elle décrit la nature. Quand j’ai lu ceci pour la première fois, j’ai pensé : Oui, c’est comme ça que l’amour doit être. Si puissant, si gros qu’on ne sait même pas où le mettre. Bien sûr, c’est là que mon côté dramatique apparaît. (Translation)