MY late mother was a lifelong admirer of anything Bront. She had read all the books and poems, went to see all the films, and in the later years of her life drew great pleasure whenever one of their classics was serialised on television.

But, being a Derbyshire lass, she had never been to the brooding Bront Parsonage at Haworth until I took her there one chilly winter's day a couple of years before she died.

In the very first room of the guided tour, the custodian pointed out the couch on which Emily died and mum burst into tears. Then, in room after room where other members of that star-crossed family died, the sobs grew deeper and heavier.

When we finally got outside into the churchyard, mum wiped the tears from her eyes, gave an elephantine blow into her hankie, and sighed: "Oh I did enjoy that..."

I will probably get into trouble for saying this, but I have always thought that there was something about the lives of the Bront sisters, as well as their literature, which has a particular appeal to women.

They squabbled with each other and lived a life which would be described now as poverty-stricken, but they were each other's mutual support in hard times. In other words, apart from their genius, there were just like sisters the world over.

As a fella, I used to more attracted to their ne'er-do-well brother, Branwell, drunkard and opium addict that he was. That has changed now because I have just met a Silsden lady who has given me a rare new insight into the lives of the Family Bront, even before they moved to Haworth.

Isobel Stirk's great-grandmother's family used to live in the same street in Thornton, Bradford, as the Rev Patrick Bront before he was made Perpetual Curate at Haworth.

Patrick was an Ulster-man with a broad Irish accent that probably made him an outsider in the then snobbish world of the C of E. This was possibly why he never arose above the rank of curate.

Isobel Stirk, who was born on a farm near Cross Hills in 1947 after her railway manager father came back from the war, spent her childhood being regaled with Bront anecdotes. Whilst still in Thornton, Patrick had caused a minor scandal after being seen shaving in an upper window - not priestly behaviour, said his church elders. Isobel's family waved them off when they packed their bags in the removals cart that took them to Haworth.

By the age of eight, Isobel was already reading the Bront books and, with a friend, set off by bus with a packet of sandwiches and a bottle of pop to visit the Parsonage. "It was wonderful for children in those days," she told me. "You were allowed to wander about on your own because no one was worried about your safety. You were in fact encouraged to be a little adventurous."

Her father, who rose to be personnel manager for the British Railways northern area, was a keen walker and Isobel followed suit. When he asked her where she would like to go for a ramble, she would regularly plump for the waterfalls on the moors above Haworth, which Emily Bront described so often in her work, or to Top Withens, the half-ruined farmhouse widely accepted as being the inspiration for Wuthering Heights.

"I was in love with the landscape just as much as the literature," she explains. "The sisters described it so wonderfully, the feel of the wind in your face, the harebells and the waterfalls in flood. I could place myself there, alongside Emily and Charlotte."

After Skipton Girls' High School, during a successful career in banking, marriage and two daughters, the literary love-affair continued. She joined the Bront Society more than 20 years ago and now gives talks to local clubs: "I try not to be a Bront bore but there a lot of things about this extraordinary family that very few people know."

For a start, she says, by the standards of the age, the older sisters did not have a life that seems so awful from today's perspective (although, of course, two younger sisters died in childhood).

"Child mortality was incredibly high on those days," she says. "You only have to read the gravestones in the churchyard to see how many children died. Some poor creatures remembered there don't even have names - they died before their parents could even give them one."

Nor, by the standards of the day, were the Bronts particularly poor. Even though Patrick was a lowly curate, Church of England clergy were well remunerated, often scandalously so: "They had their own lavatory, admittedly outside, but local records show that the working class in Haworth had one privy between 25 houses."

And Patrick himself was a bit of a character. Having preached sermons against the Luddites who were smashing looms in Yorkshire mills, he slept with a loaded pistol by his bedside - a pistol he discharged every morning, presumably to the annoyance of his neighbours.

Anecdotes like this put flesh on the bones of great literature, bringing humanity to work on subjects which all too many historians and critics make as dry as dust. Isobel Stirk hopes that the talks she gives will help: "If I can get just one person to read a Bront novel, I feel that the effort has been worthwhile."

At a time when libraries are being closed, and many children prefer a computer screen to the printed page, we could do with an army of Isobels. She could have given my old mum a really good cry!