The day I visit, the people of Haworth will enjoy an advance screening of the new big-screen version of Charlotte Brontë’s novel Jane Eyre, starring Mia Wasikowska as a not-so-plain Jane and Michael Fassbender as her brooding employer, Mr Rochester. To celebrate the film’s release, the Sunday Express was given exclusive access to the archives of the family’s former home, now the Brontë Parsonage Museum.

Library and collections officer Sarah Laycock has raided the archives for a selection of treasured artefacts off limits to the public, displayed in plastic folders on tissue-covered lecterns and handled by Sarah wearing surgical gloves. Only about two per cent of the collection is on display at any one time.

The Brontë legend grew up in the wake of Charlotte’s 1847 classic novel Jane Eyre; Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights was published in the same year as was their sister Anne’s Agnes Grey. The novels of Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell, their male alter egos, represented an unprecedented outpouring of talent from one household.

The most moving piece of memorabilia in the Parsonage collection is the only known letter in which Charlotte refers to the fact that her siblings died in such close succession, written on black-bordered mourning stationery to her friend Letitia Wheelwright. The Brontë Society paid £70,000 for the letter when it came up for auction, its tiny, faded script barely decipherable.

“We are also shown two of the miniscule books, about 1.5ins long, that Charlotte and Branwell made out of sugar bags or wallpaper fragments and hand-bound themselves. Unless you were among the collection of toy soldiers for whom the stories were intended, you would need a magnifying glass to decipher the minute script. Their size serves a dual purpose. “Sometimes the content was a little bit inappropriate, quite gruesome, like children being hanged. They didn’t want their father to be able to read it!”

Charlotte’s talent for drawing and painting is also relatively unknown but evident on a pencil drawing of Bolton Abbey, which was even exhibited in a Leeds art gallery, and a watercolour, Wild Roses From Nature.

A letter written to her best friend Ellen Nussey in 1843 shows a small caricature of them both in which Charlotte portrays herself as an ugly dwarf character.

Read more: .express.co.uk/Film-Review-Jane-Eyre