The lives of the Brontes have been picked over so often, there is surely nothing more to be said.

For some reason, however, as with Jane Austen, these writers attract a degree of biographical attention that borders on the besotted. American academic Deborah Lutz is well aware that she is treading on a path deeply rutted by the passage of thousands before her: "A whole library could be filled with books published on the Brontes, many of them so excellent that one feels there need be no more." But, undaunted, she proceeds, her aim being to illuminate these writers through their belongings. "There has been little writing on most of these artefacts," she assures us, "on some not a jot." What follows are nine chapters each devoted to a household item that offers a keyhole into the way these women thought, behaved and wrote.

Where else could she begin but with the miniature books the children made and wrote, their Borrower version of literary publications like Blackwood's Magazine. Any who have seen them for themselves, in the Bronte Museum at Haworth, will have been struck by the spirit of mischief and imagination behind them. Intended, suggests Lutz, as a way of dealing with the appalling loss the family suffered - first their mother, then two sisters in quick succession - these impish tales are a parody of adult interests, mockery in every line, but so too the belief that words can out-do death and keep the departed alive.

Less obvious possessions fill the rest of the book, among them a sampler, a book of pressed ferns and a dog's collar. It is this plain bronze collar that gives an unwelcome insight into Emily, to whose dog, Growler, it is thought to have belonged. A peculiarly withdrawn young woman, Emily was devoted to animals. As Lutz reveals, however, there was an incident in which Emily emerges not only as introverted, but vicious. After one too many scoldings by their servant about Growler sleeping on her counterpane, Emily found the miscreant, dragged him off her bed and down the stairs. Since he was known for going for the throat of anyone who tried to punish him, "before he had time to bite her, she beat him about the eyes. She punched him until he was almost blind from the swelling. Then she led him into the kitchen and tended to his wounds herself. After this, his stubborn loyalty was directed all toward her."

For those not already pitched into the world of Wuthering Heights by this vignette, Lutz reminds us of a scene in the novel where Heathcliff hangs his wife's dog by the neck, almost killing it. The violence of the real incident and the fictional cast an even deeper pall over Haworth parsonage, a place one has come to view as already wreathed in almost hysterical morbidity, much of it thanks to Emily.

These were, of course, deadly and fearful times. Lutz evokes well the atmosphere of the town and the Brontes' house, which lay beside the churchyard: "Funeral bells frequently tolled, and the 'chip, chip' of the mason, as he carved the gravestones in his shed near the churchyard, gave the air around the parsonage a mournful heaviness."

The precariousness of existence was well known to this benighted family, hence the chapter titled Death Made Material. For this, Lutz selects an amethyst bracelet that Charlotte wore after the deaths of Emily and Anne, from whose plaited hair it is made. To modern sensibilities it is a grisly object, but before photographs could offer consolation, items that came from the dead person's body gave the bereaved some solace. They might make us shudder, but the Victorian era saw a roaring trade in fashioning the hair of the dead into mementos.

With each of her objects, Lutz broadens her scope from their immediate relevance to the Brontes to bring in the wider world. Thus, in talking about a gnarled walnut walking stick which the sisters may or may not have used on their vigorous daily walks in the moors, she expands into a discussion of the almost revolutionary aspect of women of their class walking alone in this period. Such digressions also have the virtue of removing us from the sometimes suffocating Bronte household. Above all, they shed light on the age itself, which did so much to shape this remarkable trio, original and unconventional though they were.